Jul 2007

I'm writing this sat opposite a bit of the Canal du Midi, East of Carcassonne, in the South East of France. We're on day 3 of a 22-day road trip East, North and then back West again.

After spending a couple weeks down on the South Landes coast, we decided we'd had enough doing-nowt-but-surfing-and-baking-cakes and opted for a bit of adventure (also influenced by a certain gale-force onshore wind that was wrecking the surf). We did get a couple of decent surfs at St Girons Plage though these were bone-crunchingly dumpy waves which, if you were lucky and able to tuck in tightly and quickly enough, you'd get a 3-second ride before being sucked down and bounced off the sandy bottom.

It feels good to be moving on again and seeing some new stuff; the Landes coast is totally awesome but it's very big and very samey after a few weeks; everything starts to look the same and you need a new buzz; the forests are all the same and the beaches are all very big and prone to blustery conditions (not complaining, just saying...). When you're in one place you start to pick up on a lot of consistencies and here are a few we've noted:
All the old biddies appear to be fitter than I am; they ride about on their old, small bicycles in their old frocks, saddle-bags full of groceries, making long round-trips to the out-of-town supermarkets; no bus passes here, for Public Transport is nowhere to be seen. And this is the reason why all the old ladies ride around on bicycles and all the teenagers scream around the place on ultra-noisy-like-brain-rattlingly-so mopeds - I can only presume that their helmets have ultra-heavy-duty ear protectors fitted into them, or maybe they all get deaf or stupefied by the time they're 25 and that's why all the pop music's so bad here? And maybe that's the reason for the final observation we've made (of those which currently come to mind) which is that the young men aren't very nice to their dogs; we've seen countless red-faced fellas attempting to put some discipline into their poor mutts by delivering shocking rib-punches the likes of which would bruise you or I a lot, nevermind the poor pooch, the bastards!

So being back on the road is fresh and new and jolts the brain a bit more than lounging around on the beach does (I miss it already). Pepped up by this, I've come up with the following get-rich-quick schemes for when we return to normal life:

1. Open up a Chippy which does both normal Chips and also Seasoned Chips too! Anyone who makes their own chips (baked is best) and has thrown some suitably spicy and savoury (not sweet; cinnamon would be shit) seasoning will know the awesome assault of the tastebuds that results. You could have a series of trays with various seasonings in them and give people the choice, throwing the plain ones, straight from the fryer, into the seasoned pan of choice, and then into the paper bag; awesome!

2. Design and build friendly-looking Campervans; the amount of favours, free bottles of wines, chats, free parking tickets, etc. we've had as a result of people liking our 'pretty little car' has been awesome! I'd like to convert old Renault Trafic vans into campers; those things are awesome; they look like they're made of Lego bricks and all the engine gubbins, etc. is right in the front so there's heaps of headroom in the rest of the vehicle; awesome

On the way across the South we spent a day in Toulouse. This experience was way cooler than the one we had there 2 years ago when, straight after arriving at our Hotel, we witnessed a stabbing and then our evening jaunt was cut short by teams of gnarly looking dudes all giving me and Mick scary looks; we ate Kebabs and Chips in our Hotel room!
This time, we arrived on a Sunday and the market was in session; approx half a mile of fruit stalls and other delicious stuff; I might go there one day when I haven't eaten for days, with a roll of cash in my pocket! We wandered around and found the old part of the City which is full of character and awesome old-skool typography. We looked around in a couple of Gothic Churches which, with all their medieval bling and decoration were, to me, more like wandering around some MTV star's Crib than a potentially spiritual experience. That said, one did stand out to me (I can't remember the name of it, got a leaflet somewhere...) which was more like it once was Bling but is now just a carcass. It's a big temple-style building (no inner walls) with recesses going all around the sides and in these recesses, various displays have been set up with less-than-considered taste. It's almost as if this was one-too-many churches to bother furnishing and noone knows what to do with it except put in some old tattered paintings, a few stage lights and a couple of those Tourist-trapping coin memorabilia things (put €2 in, get an old replica coin out).
It was cool to be back in a City; we found a nice little Tea House which served up big wine-bottle-sized bottles of Cider for €6 and you could sit outside and get baked in the sun (sheltered from the winds in those little streets). We also visited the Cinema; living in a van has made me realise how much I love movies, etc.; we saw 'The Good Shepherd' which filled it's requirement (as far as we were concerned) of being a big, well-produced-Hollywood-style flick though afterwards I did wonder what it was about if not just one big tragic story about some American spy?

Tomorrow lunchtime we'll arrive on the East coast and it would be awesome to find some surf there (it does happen, up around Marseille), but if not we'll leg it on to Nice and then all the way up to Mont Blanc, before heading back West across the country through the 'Central Massif' which looks rather awesome but like hard work for poor little Buddy.

Spice of the week is Cinnamon: Add it to Pancake batter or season some sugary, hot milk with it (excellent if you can't sleep and you're camped up in the middle of nowhere next to a gusty, spooky Lake and you've got no wine to get you to sleep) to help you nod off. Kitty's just baking some Butter Cookies with it in too; I'll keep you posted. The other benefit of this one is, if you spill it all over the van and yourself, it doesn't matter 'cos it smells sweeeet!

We are camped up in another area near a blustery beach with mushy waves, and i have been sat outside reading my book, wrapped up in a blanket and jumpers and many other layers as its cold here, fighting off big orange ugly slugs who keep trying to steal my red wine! the cake baking was successful and its cooling now and it smells so lovely! the weather has been really weird, storms and rain and overcast days with spots of sunshine, you would think the years of living in wales would make us accustomed to the rain and we would greet it with smiling faces but unfortunatly it still gets to us and tries to bring us down, i think we presumed that each day the weather would be glorious and so hot that you could hardly move, a dip in the sea being the only relief, but actually the truth is at 3pm this afternoon we were on a beach and shivering even before we touched the sea!

we have had many ideas and plans since all this stormy weather, one being to sell the van and buy a big car which is fun to drive and head to sweden and the northern lights, another jump and hop around the greek islands, another see if the weather is better (and the surf) in cornwall, so many ideas and yet we are not sure.....hahahahahahhahaha, while writing this boo has just shouted that he has just put one of the big orange slugs in his mouth!! its real dark outside and he didnt see that one had sneakily climbed up the wine bottle and was cheekily waiting for him to take a swig!!!!! grosssss! think we will move the van away from the bushes tonight! have become really attached to this van and although its tiny and full of funny things its become a brilliant home for the summer, looking forward to sharing this little trip with catherine and ollie who are due to come over in about 3 weeks, cant wait!

Tonight we find ourselves back at the beach at 'Messanges' where the Sangria Shandies were first tasted by me and Kate with the Nick, etc. crew ~3 weeks ago. We have spent a week in Biarritz and then trickled on upto here the last few days; we stopped in Hossegor but that place is a swarming mass of Tourism and new money with too many BMW X5's and their Mercedes counterparts buzzing around the streets and up-their-arses barmaids who forgot how to smile when they were 12 (or maybe they had evil parents who never taught them how to in the first place!)

We surfed the South beach of Hossegor yesterday which was basically a case of picking whichever 4 foot ultra-dumpy wave you wanted to brave and then jumping over the back of it before scrabbling for your board, half-expecting it to be either in half from the crashing wave or have an american kid from a surf camp embedded in it's nose. This all owing to the onshore wind which is still dominating our surfing life, dammit!

For the last couple weeks we've been camping up in the 'Aire de Camping Cars' places which are like campsites without timing rules or the need to book and if you turn up at the right time (around 9pm ish) and leave early enough (before 10:30am) you can avoid having to pay and that's the real free-camping life right there!

Now that it's mid-summer the lineups are getting ever-more crowded and the camper vans ever more varied. At the beginning of May we were mostly surrounded by mid-sized modern camper vans which are kind of like mobile local Spar shops with their white facades and all the frozen meals being stored within. Nowadays we roll into camping areas and we're towered-over by big, looming juggernaut-tastic campers of old and modern age. On one side there'll be a modern camper which can be more accurately compared to big Tesco Extra stores with all their shiny surfaces and big fluorescent lights beaming across the campsite, the dwellers of which tend to spend their waking day in a pair of speedo's and spend way too much time emptying their chemical toilets.

On the other side of the van there's a team of usually 2-3 big, old, dirty-but-awesome Mercedes 650 campers or big, old Coaches filled with never less than 5 serious-looking travellers and their hoards of dogs; the guys' hair is always shaved back and sides and then big long dreadlocks sprouting outta the tops of their heads and Kate's named them 'Sprout-heads' which is surely to get me beaten up if we don't keep our mouths shut!

Amongst all these big vans our little yellow Hiace sticks out like a small toe and most nights I have it in the back of my mind that one of these big juggernauts isn't going to see us over their big bonnet and drive right over us and make camp on top of us! After all the prep we made before coming away now it's like 'who are we kidding?' with all these well-furnished mobile homes about us. I'd rather be in the Buddy van any-day though!

So I'm sitting here typing this Blog in the Messanges car park and we're hoping the wind will drop tomorrow so we can have a more mellow surf for a change. We've embarked on some cake baking; having purchased a bread tin we've adapted a Delia Smith Carrot Cake recipe to a Raisin, Cinnamon and Ginger cake recipe (Carrots go off quicker in a warm van than we thought possible!) and right now it's just about rising in the tin and smells heavenly... hopefully it will taste that way! After this I'm going to have a crack at making some Bread and if that works then I'm not sure if life can get any better!

So we find ourselves in Biarritz; Queen of France's South Coast Surf Towns. And by Queen I do mean a compact dirty, bulging bitch of filthy restaurants, more American tourists than you can swat away with a tennis racquet and very random surf conditions. But it's kind of okay when the weather's good, which it isn't.

After a short jaunt into the Pyrenees we motored-on-up (and down and up and around many, many bends) to Northern Spain's surfing coast. We arrived in San Sebastian late in the evening on Thursday to find our expectations of the place rather wrong; instead of some kind of colourful, retro surf mecca the place is like a corner of any other bustling city stuck on the sea front with average surf beaches. So we climbed up a cliff in the Yellow Submarine (van) and parked up in a strange recreation / car parking area and cooked and went to bed with one eye open cos there was some super strange vibe in that place and the ground was messier than the Soberton kitchen floor.

We awoke super early in the morning and took a walk around and wondered if our initial feelings about the place were wrong; maybe it's not such a bad buzz after all. That was until we walked close to a picnic table where a strange woman was sitting, at 7am, all dressed in black, seemingly reading a book or writing. We walked nearby her and I hollered a 'hola!' to break the ice around the place to no response. Again I hollered and still no response. Feeling a bit leery, I walked within 2 footsteps of the lady and said 'buenos dias' to still no response even though she was sat up straight, moving around and reading and stuff. Something about this situation was strange; it was like if she turned around there'd be no face just the face of Mumraa from Thundercats or something and we'd be doomed. Add this to the strange atmosphere atop that cliff to the South-West of San Sebastian and we got suitably spooked enough to motor down that steepest of downhill roads as fast as the little Yellow Van could manage without rolling off one of the edges (his wee brakes not being what they perhaps once were).

From there we drove for a day up and down steep cliffs, stopping only for roadside showers and 'Maxibon' Ice Creams and arrived in Bilbao early afternoon. We walked around and snapped too many semi-artsy-but-not-really photos and then headed north for a small beach called 'Playa la Arena'. This is a nice enough beach if you minus the huge, stinky Petrol refinery which discolours the waters, the Hoards of people such that you can't see much sand and the boy racers zooming around the car park til 4am. Actually, it's not much different to Coney Beach but with more hideously overweight people, if you can believe that.

However, next morning we awoke early to some super clean waves, as good as any I've ever had, and without much competition for the peak at that. We decided la Arena was worth braving the crowds and noise for if the surf was like this every morning so we spent a day getting baked in the sun and eating Maxibon ice creams.

Next morning we awoke to similar waves and paddled out only to be joined 30 minutes later by a team of grumpy local longboarders and the peak was suddenly over crowded with only 3-4 waves per set so maybe you'd get a wave every 45 mins if you were stubborn enough to out-paddle one of the locals, which we weren't.

Having experienced Spain thus (not to mention getting stuck at the bottom of a strange Basque meadow for 4 hours; we'll write that story another time), and with Buddy's (we christened the van 'Buddy' with Nick, etc. last week to much fanfare and Sangria!) exhaust sounding ready to pop if we take him up another incredibly steep hill, we decided to head back to classy France, via the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The Guggenheim is an awesome building but boy oh boy does that building's architecture make you dizzy; there's not one straight wall and all the floors are at different levels and the art is bigger than life too, to the point that I had to sit down once or twice and have a couple of sugar-breaks to get my head straight again.

We headed back to France and made Biarritz in 2+ hours.

So now we're sitting in Buddy, in a car park at I'lbarritz beach just south of Biarritz Centre-Ville and it's been raining for the last 3 days and we're not feeling entriely super-stoked with the summer's weather so far. I'd say we've had 30% sunshine, 70% shite and camping in the rain isn't for the sunshine-loving, let me tell you.

However, we just now listened to Dave's first solo Super Surf Show! and, By Jobe, the motherfucker actually managed to raise our spirits! And let me tell you something about that man Dave Bowen: he's got more shit in his head than he has nicotine coursing through his veins but equal-and-more comedy talent and a knack for writing which will one day make him rich and me his Butler, no doubt about that.

So tonight we are drinking to good weather and less of the messy surf of the last few days for if not, we shall most definately be boarding the plane to some sunny island, surfable or not, to enjoy our skin a bit more and the innards of our van a bit less; we shall keep you posted.

Some pics from Spain, etc:

so after the two very very positive slideshows, we have actually had a bit of a tough and draining time since.......we spent 6 days with nick, sarah, sam and james all buzzing round france and the pyreenes mountains, it was fun and the days were full and funny and nearly always ended in drinking too much of the sangria mix, convinced i could do any poi trick and ending up falling in the sand! the pyreenes were gorgeous and driving isnt a bother when the scenery is so special!

after we parted ways (the others were heading to paris) we were buzzing and looking forward to learning spanish and exploring new towns and surf beaches, we took a wrong turning and while attempting to turn around ended up on a slippery muddy slope, the back wheels started spinning and we couldnt go forward and every time we tried we kept slipping further back and landed in a muddy field at the bottom of the hill, we tried everything to get out of there, sticks, stones, dried grass and cardboard boxes, whatever we could find, jamming it all under the tyres which did squat all, we went for hunting for help - one freaky farm with weird mute girl at the window who didnt respond to anything, the other a very old couple who only spoke basque, after 5 or so hours we finally met a lovely french couple who called a recovery truck for us, 50 euro later we were out, muddy, exhausted, deflated and felt a little tapped!! our first problem of the trip!

we are loving life on the road and its great to be surrounded by similar people in big old campervans who are loving it too, its also good to be back in france after our not so successful trip to spain (read boos entry). the weather has been no better than anywhere else and although you dont expect it to be glorious everyday, the daily overcast, rainy, stormy weather would pull on any camper! have surfed lots and its been great to be in the water again, lots of various conditions mostly fun, today i had to be rescued by boo tho as i got caught in the rip and the waves were like monsters - huge and wanting to attack you - so was relieved when we got back on to the beach! we have been stopped by the police once - in spain, two serious looking policemen who ask for our driving license but we have them stashed away in the roof and they dont really care as when they see we are surfers all they wanna do is tell us the best surf spots to go to - awesome!

so we are in the little yellow box and listened to dave's version of the super surf show whilst eating dinner, its brilliant!!!! was cool to hear that he has continued the show without boo, and if im completely honest it made me miss everyone a million times more than before! on the rainy days you wish you could be transported back to see all your friends and on the sunny days you wish you could transport all your friends here to enjoy the good life! thanks dave it was just what we wanted to hear!