….………….is that it’s just too nice.  Yes I know they can’t queue like us Brits, and you can forgive their slightly childlike advertising campaigns (but not for Mr Bricolage), and you can’t take a gendarme seriously when he stops you in a Renault kangoo, but by God it’s a beautiful country full of genuinely friendly and helpful people ( apart from the lady in a restaurant in Vézelay who laughed at my pronunciation; I didn’t care for her !)

 Going to sleep last night, the plan was to turn left towards Grasse heading to Italy, however, reading an article about some fresh oysters straight from the farm on a travel site, we woke and decided to turn right… Heading towards Spain.  Currently looking out at a very rough Mediterranean Sea at Leucate with the snow capped peaks of the chains des alberes at the Spanish border on the horizon we apparently appear to be “off our intended route”

Whilst researching this area, the guide books have very little to say, they could have said ” a beautiful dunescape South of Narbonne where the freshly farmed oysters from the cafes at the front of the multitude of processing plants, melt in your mouth…..Oh and it’s bloody windy”. See, I could write for Lonely Planet.

And windy it is, brave kite surfers appear to be either in the air, on their backside or speeding so quickly in front of me I can hardly see them, Reg is rocking back and forth, providing the only shelter to a German traveller in the pitch next to us, desperately trying to light a barbecue…I’m not sure they’ll be having a warm meal tonight.

Its times like this you discover things about the ones you love, that you never knew before, in this instance, it’s the fact that our canine dustbin of a Labrador, who generally will eat anything and everything,…doesn’t like oysters..I’m ashamed of him.