Friday, September 23, 2011

Living The Caravan Park Resort Life 21 Sept 2011


11-09-21 Solstice

Another dot day, essentially. Packed up and cleaned the cabin and headed off about 10.30. Made a side trip to the Bastide village of Domme and drove around it. Successfully parked in a pay parking spot for 5 minutes, rushed over, took in the view, bought some bread and buggered off again. Domme looks like a nice place to have lunch and I had originally planned to do that but other stuff got in the way.

View over the Dordogne valley from Domme
The drive to St Emilion took about 2 and a half hours. We stopped to have French lunch on a picnic table at a servo on the freeway. Lots of other people doing the same thing, all wielding their baguettes and cheese. The folding cool bag we bought at the camping shop yesterday did a good job of keeping all our cool stuff cold and meant we could just eat what we already had for lunch.

Turned up at the caravan park at 2pm, early again but the reception was happy to let us in. She was a very young Frenchwoman who speaks English with a cockney/Australian accent. I thought she was Australian at the start and asked her... she says everyone thinks she's a foreigner. We've decided that she's French Lily Allen.
The tiny cabin

We collapsed into the cabin and had a nap before driving up to St Emilion on a reccie. Discovered that parking is scant and expensive and also that we were probably too late for tours. After doing a lap of the village and then getting hopelessly lost out the other side, we went back to the cabin and decided to have an afternoon off.

Thus, we put on the swimmers and headed to the heated pool. It took about half an hour of lying in the sun to get warm enough to swim but it was all very pleasant. There were English baby boomers complaining thqat the water was too warm but it was only just warm enough for us. Actually, there were more English people than French in this place, all the motorhomes have their awning on the left side.

I had the amazing experience of sunbaking... without sunburn. After about 2 minutes my conscience was telling me to get out of the sun but I stifled it and just enjoyed laying there.

There were all sorts of weird rules for the pool: no board shorts, no t-shirts, shower before entering, foot bath and... weirdest of all, no sun cream. Very strange.

After our resorty hour we realised that there was no beer in the equation and went back to the cabin for liquid refreshments. Cue the standard drunkeness. Lazy, we opted for the caravan park restaurant and thus had our worst meal of the tour - my pizza wasn't bad (3 cheese, not 4) but luke's fish was scarily awful.

We needed a down day. I felt I was ready for just sitting around doing nothing. While that didn't happen, it was close. We also got a bit of washing done, which is always an achievement.

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