The Buddy System

So we're back in the UK, have been for a couple weeks and have covered several miles in my brother's motor visiting friends and family aroond the contree, like. It's been a while since I wrote on here and a lot has happened so I am going to attempt, large glass of wine in hand, to address as many cool points as possible since we were in 'Cathar Country' (it could get a bit long-winded), though Kate has already written about the crazy hippy commune episode which will forever remain the scariest but most potentially-filled-with-awesomeness-but-we'll-never-know-it-but-thats-what-makes-it-cool situation I've yet been in.
So after Carcassonne, we headed to the Med and landed first in 'Palavas Les Flots' where we discovered some decently hot tarmac and the most flagrant nudist beach ever (never again). We made bacon and brie baguettes and survived the nudism for approx 2 hours before heading off again lest our appetites never ever recover.

From Palavas-Les-Butts, we drove to St Mary's by the Sea (I translated that myself; check out mon Francais!) which can have surf at times, though didn't when we were there (no surprises) so we buttered up some pasta and ate it on a small jetty thing whilst I attempted to catch some fish with some terrible Camembert as bait.

From St Marie de la Mer we motored for ages through Marseille which appears to be the Ultimate City, with beaches, a decent Marina, general cool overall feel and some fat mountains just on the way out of it. We ended up in a small seaside town called Cassis and camped up on a big ant-infested hillside for 2 nights and swam around in a small cove which had a knackered old pier on it which you could jump off into fairly shallow but super clear water - awesomeness. Cassis also has the best and cheapest bakery found on the whole tour.

From Cassis we motored East in search of the great St Tropez which we weren't sure if we really wanted to go to but what the heck? It took 24 hours longer than planned due to my awesome navigational skills but when we arrived we weren't let down a bit - plenty chubby old rich people everywhere and more white clothing than a Michael Jackson music video (err...). We had a beer or two in the cheapest looking place we could find and then zoomed out of there before we got hired as ship hands on some fat old bloke's oversize yacht.

This is the point where we met the wee hippy lass of whom you can read more in Kitty's previous post.
Post-hippy situation, we pushed Mr Buddy right to his 50 mile per hour limit all the way to a small town set amidst big cliffs with churches set atop. The cliffs were lit up by huge lighting rigs which, at night, had bazillions of bugs going crazy in their beams; it was like St Tropez for bugs; they were probably all wearing white outfits but I couldn't tell from the glare. We camped up in a car park which was fairly empty and slept fairly badly on account of the strange experiences of just a few hours earlier. I woke to find our car park was a 'use at your own risk' place due to it being close to the river which is 'prone to extreme, sudden over-night flooding'. Nice.

The next day we motored up and down various mountains, mostly in 2nd gear and it was the coolest driving ever; winding around and through mountains and tunnels with huge drops just the other side of the road. Buddy managed most hills in 2nd gear, but we had to stop halfway up most of them, for half an hour, to let him cool down, the poor lad.

Next day we motored around and up and down and into Digne les Bains, a mountain town with a cool Municipal outdoor man-made lake full of ultra freezing cold water and a big waterfall which massaged some of the Buddy-induced knots out of our shoulders nicely. This place had a strange feel to it as we were right up in the Alps with All Nature around us yet we were swimming in a man-made lake surrounded by ice cream cabins and things. Surreal.

This was a day of stupendously stupid amounts of driving as we motored all the way up to Grenoble which we had high expectations of but which was an ultra-dump, Newport South Wales-style. So we motored out of there to a small town and then ascended approx 1000 metres to a tiny municipal camp site which was more of a back garden with an outdoor loo. We were knackered at this point and so crashed here for a couple days. We went for a big hike further up the mountain, about another 400 metres up (slowly) and stopped when we felt drunk as skunks from the altitude. We sat out another of the Summer's huge storms that night (storm #13 or something) and then headed out through Chambery, towards Lyon.

Now, Lyon is the coolest city we've been to so far; there's an awesome summer festival (Le Nuits de Fourviere) each year where decent bands play and lots of free outdoor cinema goes on. And this is something a bit annoying about our trip this summer; it seems every other town we've come to has had a sweet music festival on that we didn't know about and we've missed one of our favourite bands who randomly seem to be playing there; we missed Arcade Fire in both Bilbao and Lyon, The Howling Bells played down on the Med 3 days before we arrived and The Good The Bad & The Queen played the day before we got to Lyon. One year we'll go to the Lyon festival and watch a few bands and ride around on some of the rented bicycles some more. And eat a few more 'Maxi Chocolatines'. It's worth doing some research to see what festivals are happening in Europe and where cos there are some great ones which are totally non-advertised outside of the towns they're happening in, it seems.

From Lyon we headed further West towards the surfing coast and stayed in a couple small towns along the way and then a couple days at La Maison Sedgewick where awesome food and wine is in total abundance. We ate some fish at a local village barbecue where anyone can come along with food (or buy some there) and barbecue it on one of the huge barbies and sit at a huge table in a tent and listen to terrible music - it's awesome!

We zoomed from Correze back to the coast but didn't quite make it all in one day and made the terrible decision to park-up for the night in a busy motorway services area. As we slept some sick sumbitch screwdrivered the drivers door on Buddy but didn't manage to get the door open thanks to Kate hearing them and making a bit of a racket. Me, being the next Jack Bauer, slept peacefully through and when Kate tried to rouse me, I told her not to worry it was probably just 'Acorns falling on the roof' (quick thinking!). She was right though and half an hour later when I'd managed to wake up, I discovered the damage and we raced out of there, back to the woods of Biscarosse and into the safety of Juggernaut Campervan Land.

We spent a few days lounging around and surfing small waves and sampling the WiFi and beers of The Globe Trotter Cafe in Bisca before heading to Biarritz to meet one Miss Catherine Sweet at the airport. What followed was an awesome week of decent surf for the first few days, tripod photography, knitting and free-camping in car parks with the new added challenge of finding somewhere to illegally camp but which was safe enough for Bessie to pitch her tent for the night; she did well and was well into our non-washing-eating-only-cous-cous lifestyle by the end of it.

Bessie left us and a couple of chicks from London decided they had to buy our van the next week and suddenly we were presented with the possibility of being Buddy(home)-less and with no plans as to what to do next. We spent that week cleaning the Bud up for the viewing and looking at prices for various trips which included a stop in Melbourne.

The London girls bought the van but asked us to drive it home which was just fine by us (though by this point Buddy is much worse for wear and I have super duper Gun Gum skills wheeee!). The trip home took no less than 4 days and we discovered that there's surf near Calais - who'd have thought it?

Next day we were at the Euro Tunnel departure area at 6am wondering just what the heck we were doing there; it was a total mixed bag of feelings...