The Happy Valley senior ambience of our first week at
Camping de Courte Vallee segued neatly into something more resonant of Borstal Chic as week two wore on and more and more families arrived each with a more laissez-faire approach to parental control than the last.
Consequently, the atmosphere poolside has dipped (ahem) as an ejaculate of multilingual teens try to out-bully each other in several languages whilst their parents get smashed on antifreeze-a-la-source in their Eldiss Odyssey Supervans. One particularly challenged group swerve effortlessly between Estuary English and perfect French as they hurl jibe after jibe at each other and anyone else in earshot. This group of Frockneys have had something to do the the fact that Joan has now added a roll of razor-wire to the layer of smashed-glass-en-concrete topping the swimming-pool wall and bolted a sign to the gate banning admission after 9pm.
Away from the pool, a junior gang of Frockney wannabes in their early teens have spent their time trying to catch rabies from the feral cats which roam the site. Ingeniously though, one of them came up with the wizard wheeze of calling at every tent and caravan asking for 50c to put a suggestion into a hat to name one of the mangy kitties.
Allegedly, the donations were to establish a fund to cover vets bills, etc. However, in the light of last night's scandalous apres-BBQ draw, when D'oyle Carte Godfrey was asked to select the winning entry and which resulted in the cat being named
'Miaowiecat', the suggestion of the Emma, the ringleader of the marauding band of sponsor-hungry tweenies, the money could have gone anywhere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my suggestion of Fuck Buttons stayed resolutely
en chapeau.
Anyway, we missed all the fun of course by bodyswerving the BBQ and heading off to
Airvault's Salle des Fetes for a civilised game of cricket. As you can see, we were lucky to get a parking spot:
Merri with nettles:
Merri with dock leaf:
After this, we headed, as planned, for St Loup sur Thouet, a few short kilometres away. This picturesque little town houses a funky little pizza restaurant, plying a neat trade in takeaways on Friday night. We ate in. A great goats cheese salad for me and pizzas for everyone else. Not having had a pizza since Paris, Grace had cold turkey. Not my choice, but better than the tuna and banana.
Sudoku kills apres-pizza chit chat:
After that it was back to base, driving straight through the ensuing cat-naming fracas and onto divvyingup three chapters of Harry Potter for Arthur, three episodes of Heroes for Grace, three flagons of chocolat-chaud for Merri and three valium for Lisa.
Today we woke up to rain. We hung around the tent for the morning...
... before heading to our favourite restaurant the
Au Bon Accueil in
St Generoux for the last time. Sadly without Grace, who had a mal-de-tete and remained at base guarding our stash of fizzy sweets and gateaux, we settled down for a long, luxurious lunch of seafood platter, fish a la creme, cote de porc from the woodfire grill, tarte aux prunes, chocolat mousse and ram pie.
Seafood platter before:
and after:
Back on site I checked our booking for Monday's ferry and realised that we'd been too ambitious in our plan to get from West of Paris to Calais by 11:15. I shunted it to the 15:15, in the hope that we might just squeeze in a quick omelette and chips in our favourite Calais lunch-spot.
We planned to start doing some light packing-up today, but have rescheduled the commencement of pain to tomorrow morning, on the basis that we can, as a treat, condense the shouting at the kids to a mere 48 hours rather than the pre-arranged 72.
Now it MUST be time for a bun!
