France
I won't bore you with any more repetitive alarm clock stories, but we were on our way for 10.30am this morning, which is a definite improvement. We were pleased to find out today that our sat nav is even worse at French pronunciation than we are - on the way to "Mont Saint Mitchell". George managed to sneak in as a "private vehicle under 5m" (which he is, without the bikes on the back), so we didn't have to pay the extortionate motorhome parking rate of €24.
We caught a shuttle bus across the causeway as it was hot and I was starving and didn't feel like a 40 minute walk. And it was free. The bus was very strange because it was clad in wood, and had two front ends! To save the driver turning round, he or she just has to get in the drivers seat at the opposite end of the bus and drive back the way they came.
We had originally planned to find a nice little restaurant to have lunch at, but everywhere was busy to the point of being too stressful when we arrived and they were all a bit pricey, so we settled for some filled baguettes instead. We ate them sitting on some rocks at the base of a turret thing, overlooking the sea and one of the island's many defibrillators.
I have honestly never seen so many defibrillators in such a small area. The best I have seen before is in Wales, where they seem to have one in most villages. When we started walking round it became clear why there are so many - the whole place was full of people wheezing and gasping for breath as they staggered up the many steps. I didn't get a chance to try out my defibrillating skills, but we did see two separate sets of paramedics (one of whom was wheezing up some steps), an old lady in a survival blanket in an ambulance, and a man with a freshly bandaged knee with blood on his leg.
We didn't stay as long as we thought we would as it was a bit too crowded for our liking. Although we did manage to get a few photos of us and Chris Bear. We walked back across the causeway (we thought we'd better try and burn off the baguettes and ice creams we'd eaten), and were back at George by 3pm, which left us plenty of time to finally cross the county border into Brittany.
We've been surprised at how far apart everything is here. Even when we use the fast roads it takes an awful long time to get to where we want to go. Everything looks so much closer together on the map. We eventually arrived in our chosen area at about 5.30pm. Our preferred campsite was closed so we found another one nearby with yet another warden who didn't speak much English.
This is another municipal site, near a town called Plougrescant. The sites we've stayed at so far (this is the 4th) have been varied, and strangely, the less we've paid, the better they seem to be. As a general rule, they all have one thing in common though - you have to provide your own toilet paper! This isn't a problem in principle, but in practice you nearly always forget it and have to go back or improvise somehow. Tonight's site is an exception to the rule, which we were a bit more excited about than we should have been.
We've put our awning up tonight, as we're staying at least 2 nights. It's good because it gives us a bit more space, particularly if it rains, but it's flapping in the wind due to rushed pitching. Claire seems to be able to ignore it but I think I will have to use my ear plugs tonight.
Tomorrow we're going to use the bikes that we've brought all the way from home, starting with an early morning trip to the boulangerie for croissants, and then for a ride around the coast.
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