France Day 14
After breakfast and dumping/refilling we hit the road again. Kaddi wanted to see Parthenay which sounded really lovely in our guide book but was quite a bit off our “planned” route along the coast. So we did a bit of driving along the Autobahn.
Most highways in France have tolls, but it's not always clear which do and which don't and how much it will cost. The most annoying thing are the toll stations. There's only machines to pay at and those are clearly not designed to be used by motorhomes. They are super hard to reach and sometimes won't accept our credit cards. We liked the system in Portugal better where your rental car had a electronic device and you simply could drive through the toll gate and would pay later when returning the car.
Anyway we arrived in Parthenay in the early afternoon. It was a nice enough medieval town but again very much empty. The few restaurants were just closing again, there were no stores and the only people we saw were assembling in front of the church for some kind of religious service. No idea what it was about and why they were standing in front of the church blocking traffic when they had a perfectly nice church they could have used.
We took our stroll through the town, stole some rosemary in a public garden and returned to the car. The emptiness and feel of abandonment of these little towns was dragging us down a bit. We made coffee and ate some instant noodles and decided to return to the coast.
The long drive took us through the Vendée region which is mostly marsh land that has been cultivated through lots of little canals. We had some stops for gas and cheese but saw nothing of interest really.
We tried to find a spot close to the sea. The first one we tried was not an official camping spot and campers were actually forbidden, but we saw quite a few smaller vans setting up for the night there anyway. However there was not any good space for a camper of our size, so we just parked and had a view at the ocean.
We picked an official area a bit further north and set up camp there. Then we took our left over bottle of wine and went to the beach. We sheltered in a little fort someone else had built, watched the sea and drank our wine. It was very relaxing.
When the wine was gone and the wind got too cold, we returned to the RV and made dinner: Shrimp with egg rice and vegetables. The space had some (crappy) Wi-Fi so we finished the day with a bit of Youtube.
