This is us saying goodbye to the girls before we left. We look very happy and relaxed and that is because we FINALLY got them back after they had escaped …because someone accidentally left the gate open as he was taking our bags to the car. We had to do some serious chasing to catch them.

We had a wonderful ten days at Melinda’s place and enjoyed looking after Lola and Fizz.

Michael had worked out a very interesting route to get us to this part of the French coast. We took every small road we could to avoid traffic and to also enjoy the scenery. Much of our trip took us through the Landes Department, famous for having the largest maritime pine forest in Europe. The forest was planted to convert this once swampy area into something useful.

One exciting moment for Michael was when we crossed the Garonne River as he had done a project on this in Year 7 French. Not that he could tell me much about it.

We stopped at one little town called Bazas and were surprised at the unusual buildings. Very different to where we had been.

I drove almost 230 Km and we did not really get lost at all, thanks to all our solid research before we left. As we approached the outskirts of this coastal location we noticed a heap of boats sitting in mud. We think this was a marina at low tide. Boy!

We had written down every last one way street in this town to get us to our fabulous two star apartment and we were faced with this.

Our street was blocked off just in the section we needed. After going around in circles (and getting a feel for the area), I pulled over and switched on my flashing lights while Michael bravely ran up the street to find out what we were going to do.

We made it to this apartment / hotel and after I queried the parking space that was left, I was told that this is the only hotel in the city that has free parking and virtually told to stop my whining. Which I did. Take a look at how close the back right hand tyre is to the gutter. We think the car will stay here for the three days we are here.

At least the sun is shining.