Wednesday 31 October
Guignicourt, France – Le Crotoy, France.
Today we stuck to the plan to travel to a campsite as close to a beach as possible. Leigh had mentioned to Tom about stopping off in a village or town for a ‘Plat du jour’. There were two reasons for this: Leigh has signed up to go vegetarian for the month of November so she felt to have a good, filling lunch cooked for her (yes, meat included as is oft the main course of a plat du jour in France) and secondly, whenever she is in France she feels eating in a typical and traditional French ‘restaurant/dining room’ just has to be done.
We came off the motorway just before the town of Amiens to fill up with diesel and then re-programmed TomTom to take us to our destination avoiding toll roads. The route was wonderful; small towns and open-countryside (we even spotted a field where Bamboo was being grown) where brilliant-yellow rape-seed, startingtoturnblue linseed, and crops of sugar-beet were flourishing.
By chance Tom spotted a sign advertising ‘Plat due jour’ for eleven euros and managed to park dead opposite the restaurant. Leigh ran over to check that dogs were allowed in (I was) and so it was mission accomplished regarding lunch. Tom did laugh when Leigh told him she thought she might have said to the waitress, ‘I am a dog’, instead of, ‘I have a dog’. Anyway, the waitress understood and I lay quietly under the table whilst the humans ate…and drank a half carafe of vin rouge as is the norm here evidently. Yelp!
We arrived at our site around 3.30pm and (after a nap) took a stroll down to the beach.
There were a couple of horses and riders down there and a few guys who had evidently been hunting – they carried guns and spades. The beach here is covered with flora and I wonder if the birds that are being hunted take cover in this? Are the spades necessary to dig out the birds or their nests? I must do a little research I guess.
Woofs, Martha xx