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” and then he shows bleary eyed Del (who turns out to be far too small for his tent and now it all makes sense with the snoring and Portuguese night-wailing) a digital camera, which has the ability to capture small movies and what a wonderful world it really is, and the footage is great! Down on the beach is another story, with such large tides the conditions change rapidly and the magical point now only exists on the little digital screen.
Emotions are good on this morning - that usually means that nobody is being emotional - the caravan rolls on smooth. The statue of liberty (lower case) is visited and we all thought it was bigger than that, and Hellybutt also tries to surf another perfect left that isn’t perfect at all and there goes his emotions for the remainder of the day. The coast line this whole time is throwing down honest truths about size and conditions and it tells us that there won’t be anything to be shredded for a good week. She-it. All it means is more time for poetry readings, fixing broken cameras and wandering about the empty forests in flannelette shirts. Although, who would really want to walk about here? In these western pine-lined tombs? Bodean keeps shouting “MONOCULTURE!” at the big trees, because they kill anything on the floor and the birds can’t stand to live there either - Del mumbles “You could just kill someone out here. Jus’ kill em dead. Leave the body hanging up. Nobody noes nuthin about it”. So it seemed that we was all losing our minds, camping down by the biggest, fresh water lake in France, and the yachting journalist from La Rochelle tells us how warm Australia is this time of year and that didn’t we know this. The caravan doesn’t need to hear this and to bludgeon out the sound of reason it drives deeper into the horizontal alpine maze. Wild boar scream across our path and deer watch with those sexy batting dear eyes.
The monotony ends and Lacanau-Ocean arises from the green. With the first sight of roofed accommodation we bail in through the doors, and sigh and sigh and whistle out the windows at the storm front grappling up from the Pyrennes Mountains.
