So, on the Friday morning, we packed our beloved Moho Ziggy up, and set off towards La Belle France. This was also the hottest day, and by the end of it, I realised that Madame was suffering with a bit of heat stroke – so much so that this morning as I type this – saturday, madame is doing what the Nurse bloody tells her to do…. either way, temperatures for us in the van hits 34 degrees celcius and the sunshine was unrelenting – indeed it was a relief when we went through the tunnels.

This route historically part of the Camino de Santiago – obviously not on the motorways but! It is stunning from a landscape viewpoint, and the sheer engineering involved in carving the roads in this area is mind boggling.

I have no recollection of how many tunnels we went through – but i did keep a rough count of the distance – some 14km in total! A few folk have asked me about driving in Spain, and have i found it hard – the answer is no, but do pay attention on the motorways – especially to the road markings – they are the key I found for lane positioning, and once I had worked that out, it was plain sailing for us. (the broken dashed line is an indicator of a junction ahead to the right – and some of those become their own filter lane, some do not – look ahead worked well for me!).

Once we arrived in France, we continued up to Bayonne – now our friend Stephen had advised me that the Fetes du Bayonne was going on while we were there – but, it had now seemingly developed a darker side; certainly i noticed an awfully strong smell of testosterone around the town – and most men were wearing the white shirt and red neckerchiefs…. I am also aware that a large part of the festival involves bull runs / bull fights and i am – well, just uncertain to be honest. We decided to pass on going into the town, especially as Madame was wilting under the heat.

I had booked us into Lou P’tit Poun via CAMC – I have to say that I found booking via CAMC easy, and we did save money on the crossings; OK we do not have the choice to move on / use aires but – for this trip I wanted to be fairly organised – or as my sons tell me – I have OCD… We made good time to the camp site, and arrived just after 1300…. its southern France, and its Basque so its Siesta time until 1500….. well, not an issue I said to Jo – lets go find a supermarket, fill up with diesel – so I fired up the twat nav and off we set. Now one of the things we wanted to get from this trip was a taste of how normal life in France is…. and we certainly saw that as the sat nav took us into the suberbs – very nice – but very narrow! Fortunately I had seen a sign for an Intermarche so was able to turn round and head back to it – we filled up and looked for somewhere to park Ziggy while we did some shopping…. well that supermarket was close to Bayonne itself and it was busy, so we drove off to another that we had seen on our drive through. Parked up, did some shopping and I got to use my atrociously accented Francais – Vraiment, Madame achetez une sandwiche – so i must have got something right 🙂

We headed back to the campsite, and checked in – the lady who runs the place took us to our pitch on her Golf Buggy – I felt certain that when it was plugged in to charge, so was she as she was a dynamo in appearance. This site itself is lovely – their is a clubhouse and pool, which was not heated, but that was wonderfully refreshing in the 33 degree sunshine.

One thing that had concerned me about using european campsites was Reverse Polarity and I had invested some time and effort in acquiring some ready made fixes and solutions. The first thing is – Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring! I had bought a simple tell tale plug in adapter and I had that plugged in by the door so once connected, I could see what was going on electrically

So, this showed that yes, indeed we had reverse polarity – now i did have an fly lead adapter with me, but, the first thing i did was to try a different socket. (Be aware that many camp sites do not use the UK standard plug for EHU – i I also travelled with a euro mains adapter) Now that particular mains block had 6 power outlets on it – and the next one i tried was fine – all three lights lit correctly – then i could turn on the fridge etc, and get the rest of the stuff unpacked and ready.

During the evening, we went down to the club house, spent time with a couple – retired – from Wales and had something light to eat. The bar only sold two beers, WifeBeater and a French Pale Ale called Bob’s Beer…. I preferred to be like Bob 🙂

Finally, I had a new to us sun screen to fit to the front of the roll out awning – I wanted something that could both act as a bit of a privacy screen, but also to increase the shade – there was no way I was going to put a wind break up as we needed the breeze to try and cool down a tad! With madame still feeling a tad fragile – and a full laundy basket, Today I have mainly done the washing – and i do believe the sun is over the yard arm and a beer is called for!