Vacation in France – Part 3

Day 9: Lost – La Molliere, 180 km

After coming back to our tent the previous night nothing could keep us awake. Well, there was a fire close by so the Boyfriend went to check it out. But I couldn’t really be bothered, I was just dozing off dreaming of the day we just had. The next morning we went to a bakery for breakfast and I somehow (I don’t know what had gotten into me) decided to have eclairs for breakfast.

I had two and a half eclair and was in a major sugar high for the rest of the morning (and also feeling a little nauseous). First, we went back to Rouen. We managed not to get lost and safely made our way to the parking garage. We visited the typical touristic stuff: the church, the clock and the Jeanne d’Arc square.

image from here.

Look how cool of a building McDonalds was situated in:

Then we drove towards the coast and further up north to spend a few days at the beach before starting our tripe home. We wanted to stay for two nights at our camping site, so we searched for a camping site with a swimming pool. We drove and drove and drove.

I did most of the  driving that day because the Boyfriend had backpain. At some point I got so tired that all I could do was focus on the road and just go wherever the Boyfriend sent me. After visiting the gazillionth camping site without pool, we finally found a tourist office that pointed us to a camping site in La Molliere, close to Cayeus sur Mer. I was plain exhausted after we put up our tent. So we just had a quick dinner and crashed afterwards.

Day 10: La Molliere, 0 km

Activites of the day: read, relax, throw rocks at the beach

 

relax some more, make a scene at the reception desk…Seriously the Boyfriend got kicked out of the pool because he wasn’t wearing tight fitting swimming shorts. He has these loose fitting boxershorts which only our whole country uses, but apparently in France this is not so common as they consider it unhygienic or something. We were disappointed since we spent so much time looking for a camping site with a pool and we didn’t have any problems at other campings. But hey, we entertained ourselves anyway. At the end of the day we went to a cute town called St Valery sur Mer and had another lovely dinner, which was a good end to a very relaxing day.

Day 11: La Molliere – Oye-Plage, 220 km

All rested up after our relaxing day we started to head back home. We drove up the coast and ended up at Oye-Plage, somewhere between Calais and Dunkerque which is very close to the border with Belgium. It was a long drive, but we took it easy and made lots of stops on our way getting there. We found a nice camping site, right next to the beach. The Boyfriend went to play with his kite, and I went for a lovely run along the beach. It was great and very relaxing!

Then it was dinner time. We drove back to the last village of any significance we had seen, and gave ourselves a hard time finding something for our last dinner of our vacation. We finally decided on pizza. Turned out it was only take out, but that was ok. We had a bottle of wine left (a miracle!) so we would just eat it at the tent with a glass of wine. So we studied the menu forever and when we finally made our picks we were told that they were not serving pizza for the next hour. That was too much for my hungry stomach so we left. Done with figuring out where to eat we remembered we saw a pizza van on our way, so we headed there. On the van it said that it was pizza made on a wooden fire. Right….Sure…

We thought it was probably ready-made pizza heated up. Turned out the guy actually had a wooden fire heating his oven in that van! He was really nice and actually made the pizzas fresh with fresh ingredients and everything. Wow! We raced home and enjoyed the best pizza of our vacation curled up in our sleeping sacks sitting by our tents with a lovely glass mug of wine. It was a really nice and quite romantic last night.

Day 12: Oye-Plage – Home, 380 km

Today was our last day, and we headed back home. Though I was sad that vacation time was almost over, I was also very happy to see the kitties again and get to sleep in an actual bed. I was really feeling stiff all over by now.

But first we had a couple of 100ks to drive. We had coffee in Dunkerque at a bar. It was a weird place. Most of the people were already heavily drinking beer at 11am. And there were a few gamblers trying their luck on those papers you have to scratch to see if you win. Odd.

We quickly drove across Belgium and decided to make a slight detour to visit my sister who lives in the South of the Netherlands really close to the border with Belgium. It was nice to see her and catch up. Then it was time to go home. My brother was our house and cat sitter and he asked if we would join him for dinner. He cooked us a great meal and we had a good night together before we finally hit the hay our lovely big and comfy beds.

Okay, so that was all peeps! I hope you liked the story. Let me know if you ever made a road trip and blogged about it. I would love to read.  Are you someone who plans an entire trip? I used to be one, but I decided I wanted to go on a relaxed holiday, so that involved not planning ahead. I also took very little stuff (you saw my car) so no deciding on what to wear etc. It was really liberating and relaxing!