9 February 2024 – We’ve made it to the Med!

Miles driven today = 51

Total Miles to date = 861

We’ve been hearing that, yet again, you’ve all been experiencing more foul weather back home in the UK, but I’m afraid we can’t be particularly smug about it because it’s pretty grubby here too with rain for most of today together with high winds.  But we have finally made it to the Mediterranean coast, albeit that it looks far more like the North Sea today.

We are in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, capital of the Camargue.  Other than a quick Lidl stop in Beaucaire we drove straight here this morning from Avignon.  I did fancy having a look at Arles as they have some impressive sounding Roman ruins there but the weather was wet and in all honesty we are pretty much done with towns for a few days at least.  We have to retrace our steps back that way when we leave here so maybe we will pop in for a look then.

The Camargue is famous for its white horses and its black bulls and we saw a number of both grazing in fields whilst on the drive here.  Bull fighting is still popular in this part of the World, which quite frankly disgusts me, but you can see the local bull ring in the background of this photo.

Once the skies had cleared a little we took ourselves out for a walk around the town.  A lot of the holiday lets on the outskirts reminded me of army barracks but the older area in the centre had a fair bit more charm, even if the vast majority of shops and eateries are closed for the winter.

The decidedly skinny Hotel de Ville is apparently a museum now but that too looked very ferme.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is famous for having an annual gypsy festival and 3 weather beaten ladies of the road tried to push sage leaves into our hands as we approached the central Eglise des Saintes Maries.

The harbour predominantly provides moorings for pleasure craft but there are still a fair number of small fishing boats to supply the numerous seafood restaurants which line the seafront road.  We’re hoping to find one which is open tomorrow evening to treat ourselves.

We made our way through to the Etang des Launes.  The Camargue is basically a huge wetland area between the points where the 2 branches of the Rhone enter the sea.  

It’s an important site for many varieties of bird and other wildlife.  We spotted herons of both grey and white varieties and also this huge flock of coots bobbing around on the lake beyond the rushes.

The area also has a population of some 50,000 flamingos in the summer months and 10,000 actually overwinter here but I’m afraid the closest we got to seeing any today were these rather static examples at the campsite entrance.

We are staying in a huge complex called Camping la Brise de Camargue.  Its another ACSI site.  €25 a night this time including hook up.  We are less than 200 metres from the shoreline and can easily hear the constant crash of the waves from the van, which I am hoping will prove to be wonderfully soporific tonight.  

We are booked here for 2 nights.  The plan was to get the bikes out tomorrow and make use of the numerous cycle paths through the wetlands but with heavy rain forecast at least until lunchtime and the high winds persisting beyond then, I’m afraid that plan is looking unlikely. So we will most likely be battening down the hatches until the worst of the wet passes and making use of the laundry facilities to replenish our rapidly depleting stock of clean undies.

10 February 2024 - Indoor games and Flamingos