After a few days with friends in Brittany, we set off on our journey south to The Pyrenees. We had decided to hug the coast, but unfortunately the road was unobliging.
Still we did find ourselves in the beautiful and historic port town of La Rochelle, with it’s impressive harbour entrance and enchanting medieval streets with a wonderful Marché Central spilling out onto them.
We sat overlooking the harbour and enjoyed a feast of moules marinière, a sharing platter of cheese and cured meats and a bottle of rosé. No mistaking it - we were in France. Oh yes! The shared sanitary facilities.
It’s not that I’d never noticed it before, it’s always been like that. Just that now it jumps out at me because of all the hysterical debate over toilets in Britain.
We were still determined to find France’s ‘Big Sur’, so we marked out a string of towns with the suffix ‘sur Mer’. It started well with our unexpected ferry ride across to Le-Verdun-sur-Mer. but what followed were a succession of uninspiring ‘seaside’ resorts mostly miles from the actual sea, with the only ‘port’ being at Hourtin. It’s a port on the largest freshwater lake in France. Luckily we did find a very pleasant campsite in the middle of a forest at Salles.
Today we’ve decided to skip the search for the sea and go pretty directly to Bilbaoto visit the Guggenheim. We’ll probably make a couple of detours to visit Biarritz and San Sebastian where it had been our intention to stay and from there explore Bilbao, but the options for camping there seemed poor and expensive. After a couple of nights in Bilbao we will head for the ‘main’ part our trip - the journey along the Pyrenees
