Il Pleut!

The storm came! We woke up in Hecho to torrential rain and headed off as planned to San Sebastian, the idea being that we would do a near enough full circle of Spain and Portugal. The rain continued on the 2 hour drive across and had actually intensified by the time we arrived in San Sebastian so we decided to continue on into France and up to the Dune Du Pyla on the Arcachon Basin. The rain continued unabated and in fact didn’t subside until the following morning.

Whilst having breakfast the next morning we noticed that a German guy a couple of pitches along had got himself stuck in the sand. After seeing him struggle to dig himself out using a plastic chock I decided to lend a hand, armed with our latrine shovel! I headed across and after five minutes or so managed to get him out. His wife then insisted on taking the shovel and washing the sand off. A couple of days later we were in the campsite shop buying some essential supplies – Hoegaarden, as we came out there was a ‘Bonjour’, our first thought was that it was a customer survey, as it turned out it was the German’s wife who had seen me buying Hoegaarden and had bought me a can as a thank you! One good turn……

The Dune Du Pyla is one of our favourite places in France. We first came across it back in 1992 and have returned four or five times since. The dune stands surrounded by the sea and a pine forest and is the largest sand dune in Europe at 3 km long, 0.5 km wide and over 100 m high.

The Dune

There’s plenty of cycling through the pine forest albeit on paved cycle ways, opportunities for going off road are limited due to the very sandy soil. For walking you need to look no further than the dune.

Walking on the dune

Limited off road opportunities

Over the years the dune has become a magnet for parapenteurs (paragliders) and most evenings they can be seen cruising up and down (over) the beach.

We ended up staying here for 4 days (good to stay in one place for a while), and from here we are going to move on to Paris, where we plan to spend a couple of days before returning home for a week.