Saturday 22nd – Tuesday 25th June, warmer and sunnier but very windy
On Friday I had one more meeting and then we returned the hire car to Toulouse airport. The weather was so wet that B had to follow me in Horatio rather than on The Beast. As we had to pack everything up to do that we moved for the last night to a drier (?) plot with a much shorter squishy walk to the loo and then left from there the following morning.
We felt sad as we had so looked forward to our 10 days there and had pre-booked and paid for our prime lake front location. In the end we had a couple of lovely days but the rest of the time it was rain and storms and we had taken The Beast 200 miles there, only to use it just once and even then we were being chased by the rain! Even being serenaded nightly by the frogs on the lake – great weather for them – was not enough to keep us any longer….
So as it was we left 4 days earlier than planned, in search of some dryness and warmth. We got it, but the penalty was more wind – northerly at up to 28mph which again doesn’t make for comfortable bike riding!
We toured some sites near Agde, close to the coast but they had little shade (!) and the plots were tiny – many too small to get Horatio onto. So we went inland to a site not far from Pezenas. The pool was green and full of frogs and reception all closed up so we thought it was shut down! But Madame came out of her living room and said we could stay – it was getting late after a 150 mile drive plus mucking about in Agde, so we did. Actually, without the wind and with a full, clean pool, it would have been a lovely site, though it was in the middle of nowhere next to a village with nearly no shops or services. But we were warm again!
We toured some of the local villages and had lunch one day in Pezenas, a lovely medieval old town centre where most of the restaurants are like the Tardis, small with a series of small stone walled rooms extending back, usually with a small garden or terrace in the middle. The small roads are lined with artisan shops – clothes, shoes, jewellery, paintings, little things you didn’t know you needed to make your house look pretty – that sort of thing. Of course, when we go anywhere on the bike I am told I cannot buy anything as we cannot carry it…mmm…..
The highlights of those 4 days were Pezenas, a lovely old chateau in Napoleonic style – highly decorative – which was a centre for disabled people and impossible to photograph due to the trees around it, and seeing a hoopoe. No photo of that either, but it’s a very pretty brown bird the size of a collared dove, with black and white striped wings, a long beak and a proportionately long set of cock feathers on its head. I remember seeing them in my bird books I had as a child, but have never seen the real thing until now. Another nature moment.