November 2009
56 posts
disbanded
The bourgeois bicycle caravan bulges in the hot Capbreton afternoon and the streets, parks and beaches sigh in the easy aftermath of the Atlantic storm. The trailers are full, the side bags are full, every holding point is weighed down. Del is whistling, Bodean is making an inventory of his booty of film and Hellybutt is attempting to roll his r’s, because someone has just told him a story...
icarus of his eye
Del da Foster has thrown in the towel. The eternal optimist has crumbled and the falling debris will send ripples and then surges of terror throughout the caravan. “May-bee - just mabee - there ain’t no ‘Wounded Gull’? Huh? Didyer every think of that?” slurred Del at Jimmy Bodean and Harold Hobart Hellybutt, who had been out shopping and searching aimlessly for the...
“and so it goes, our instant photography turns analogue”
– Bodean - stepping up the use of the poloroid film
the sobbing and broken pole-vaulter
The caravan thumps down on the gypsy wooden pegs for the last time in Capbreton - the port town south of Hossegor. Along the stone waterfront, which is being sured-up against the Atlantic, the nations awkward athletes stagger and wheel themselves about wondering whether they picked the right sport. They are all being housed in a red brick, monstrous sports rehab clinic which overlooks the ocean...
the dying Gaul
No waves, no seagulls and no stories. Not a sign of that wounded gull and Bodean has been going out of his mind - this was the adventure to capture the image perfect and the seabirds had either been stone dead and ten days rotting in the wet sand or flying high and free. Yeah maybe there had been the odd funny story, maybe a stoush of inspirational verse here and there, even an intriguing tale...
the blunt sharpshooter
The road is now straight and flat, more or less and give or take, except the suddenly most inconvenient Bassin D’Arcachon. Couldn’t the Germans have filled it in during the Second Great War? Or why not you, Boney? You lazy Corsican ladder climber. The caravan does really enjoy a good ferry crossing, but it is also that damnable time of year in the Southwest where anything of use is...
make all the world's sailors blush
Sitting it out, sitting on it, sitting under this rock pelting, shore-shaping weather. Three absorbed children of the eighties sitting inside of three wooden garden sheds - which leaked and the doors spoke in the high winds - the owner wasn’t anywhere to be seen and it made one wonder what she could be doing in Lacanau-Ocean, it was all boarded up. Then it collectively dawns - that well...
“yup…it’s dead…(sigh)”
– Bodean - today the digital camera broke. It survived wind, cold and rain like you would never believe. But it can’t handle a little one foot fall at the supermarket. Still, the waves are pumping, and we made it to hossegor…so does it matter that much?
watery destiny
Our watery destiny is now embraced head on as we pack up to the sound of distant and then closer gun shots - those poor animals, all wet, and kept up by a bright moon and lectures by the caravan, then to be chased and fired upon the very next morning. Whooping back into the clearing like a wounded Iroquois is Bodean, yelling about “cranking lefts” and “spitting big-rollers”...
“you do know it’s nearly summer in Australia”
РFran̤ois - International yachting journalist, in the rain, in the winter, in France
end of autumnal days
Fine autumnal days have finished for certain this time, and winter is ushered in with a dynamic westerly front. Those big grey clouds brought cold now, not just pelting rain. It is the nature of the beast, we suppose whilst trundling down to Royan, gruff winds blow around here this time of the year. The towns get further apart and further closed - usually overcrowded during the hot days - but now...
“on the road again…just can’t wait to get on the road again…”
– The combined caravan - leaving the home comforts and heading south into the forest
Les Hiddons walks amoung us
Today everyone has dried out, almost to the point of cracking. And then some think what will be the use of drying out when the weather is set to rain in from the Atlantic for a week and evermore, but they don’t pass up a seat around the fire. Silly pessimists.
Jean-Yves is a chilled out bloke, once tied in with the seasons, now set to sit on the island for abit with plans to go rummaging...
the bridges!
Everything is relative - what was once considered heavy rain is shifted down the scale to light drizzle, as Del looks up at a booming clock in the Rochefort Station and Bodean attempts to drink a drip falling from way, way above the tiled floors. That water is probably filthy, filtered through pidgeons dreaming up in the rafters, so thinks one of those helpful desk ladies.
“Gnarly,...
no hell sessions of moonshining
Even though the drinks weren’t overflowing, as it surely does in Valhalla, there was still a round of wooden faces on the morning the caravan left the Quiberon. And it made them all a little sheepish, talking previously of drinking rivers of beer and freshly tapped bores of cognac, in this real world Del, Bodean and Hellybutt find that they can’t offord any hell sessions of...
