France June 24 - part one

 As I said, this was our laziest holiday for a long time. We walked plenty - it was about a 2km (1.25 miles) walk along the beach into town, and we did that most days and twice a couple of days, and I swam most days. But we really only visited a couple of places, a small town about 10 km down the road, and another town where we went on Sunday morning hoping to find a car boot sale. I think it was probably rained off - I checked a couple of websites before we left the campsite, but there was no update and we decided to risk it. What we got instead was a lovely walk upstream along the river into the countryside, and then a walk downstream along the river into the centre of the town. But as it was raining all the time, I only have a couple of photos from there, and none of them made it into my Google album (Charentes Maritime, June 24) . We really enjoyed the fact that all along the length of the river there was a trail with reproductions of paintings by Gaston Balande, who was born in Madrid but grew up in Saujon.  As it pretty much rained all that day, we also went to an exhibition in Royan, an interpretive centre of the architecture and heritage. There was a very informative video - the town must have been beautiful in its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it became popular as a seaside resort. But it was seriously bombed in WW2, destroying over 80% of the buildings, so it is now a very modern and (to our eyes) rather soulless town. There were some very interesting models of some of the classic buildings that survived and some of the major new ones, and a reproduction of a Seventies kitchen and sitting room which we enjoyed. 

So I guess in this post I'll add a couple of  Gaston Balande's paintings and a couple of photos from the interprative centre, and save the rest for two more  posts.  The next post will be the other town we visited - Talmont-sur-Gironde, listed as one of the most beautiful villages in France. It was founded in 1284 by Edward 1st of England - and the rest can wait till later in the week...

Picture trail along the river Seudre, paintings by Gastone Balande. 

Model of Japanese-style house in Royan

All the paraphernalia associated with comfortable camping! We hired a fridge this year, because last year often the only time we needed to go out in the car was to buy ice blocks for my good coolbox. And I must say it was very nice to be relying on either a small portable solar panel or a long drive to keep our phones, camera and Kindle charged. We bought the large black trunk a couple of years ago to make packing the car easier, and it's great on-site for waterproof storage and an extra surface for food prep. New this year was a little CampinGaz grill, which was great not only for burgers and skewered meat, but with the addition of a pizza stone it was excellent for cooking pizzas - widening our options. We bought the stools last year, and they are brilliant because they telescope right down to just a couple of inches high. 

I was going to add a video of a sparrow enjoying a dust-bath, but as I only took it on my phone I don't think it's worth it.  We had a lot of birds on our pitch - both male and female blackbirds, robins (we saw a red squirrel a couple of times too), pigeons galore, and while I only heard an owl a couple of times, the last few nights we could hear a night jar regularly.