The disadvantages of a wild camp (like no water) are sometimes more than offset by the advantages. A wild camp has no loud continuous talkers next door, no backing of trailers and revving of engines, and (hopefully) no mysterious close sounding footsteps through your site. Besides, it's fun to be all alone somewhere.
We left our peaceful wild camp quite early, and photographed the dawn from the road. Actually, it's really easy to do this now, that dawn comes around 7:30 a.m.!
Getting up and getting going promptly does not mean hurrying all day. Pretty soon after starting we ran into a diversion to the house of Georges Clemenceau, at the beach in St Vincent sur Jard. Usually we will not go off route, but Dodie is a history buff. Clemenceau was prime minister of France during part of WWI, and hleped engineer the Treaty of Versailles. Earlier, he had been a staunch defender of Dreyfus, in the famous affair.
In Longeville, the whole main street was chewed up. We think the departure of the tourists is the cue for ripping apart and repairing things.
The detour took us through the town and to the windy beach. The house was Clemenceau's retirement place (he was born here in Vendee department) and he made a project of the garden, with his friend Monet. Of course the place was closed (too early) so we could only shoot one photo through the fence. The garden looked pretty plain, but the main attractions were not lined up with my hole in the fence.
We pedalled back up from the beach, and in so doing ran in to the Velodysee track. We followed it for a bit, but soon gave up on it. We took the road when the track became just gravel. Through the day we mostly took the roads, but hopped on and off the track periodically. Sometimes we just lost the track, and sometimes we declined to follow it as it dipsy doodled around.
Dodie thought this looked like rain. Actually it did rain a bit, causing us to repeatedly put our gear on and off.
Whether by track or road, what we are doing is crawling up the coast of Vendee region. with the Bay of Biscay out to our left. Sometimes we touch the beach and sometimes we are just cranking through marsh or forest. There are about two dozen towns to look at along the way, and it is interesting to assess the different character of each. Among them are old stone villages, ones with newer whitewashed houses, and more beachy places. Interestingly, the churches here are mostly quite low rise, look very very old, and have no over the top decoration inside.
There have been two standout larger towns on our way today. First, Les Sables d'Olonne appeared in the distance as a white city, like on the Mediterranean. That is, there is a long line of tall white apartments. Closer up, these buildings revealed some nice architectual touches, and many were indeed very attractive. As we rolled in to town, we had the wind behind us and so were feeling good about wind as a concept. So when we stopped at a shop to buy post cards we were attracted by unique wooden whirly gigs spinning in the wind outside. Our bikes each now have this extra biit of decoration.
The other town was Saint Gilles Croix de Vie. Like Les Sables, this has a harbour, with attractive buildings lining it. However the main nice bit was north of town along the waterfront cliff, where the views were good and the houses very nice.
After Les Sables, forest areas contained an incredible number of secluded picnic tabled potential wild camp prospects, but it was still far too early.We told ourselves we would begin to quit for the day around 6, by first looking for an open camping and then looking for a wild camp.
As it happens, in that nice area just north of Saint Gilles we found an open camping. So now we are showered and are since the place is deserted, our electronics are charging in the sanitary block. We are right beside the ocean, so our little brains should not wonder what the thundering is as we snooze away, waiting for another fun day.
The Super U. There is one in almost every town here. The quality of French processed foods continues to astound us.
