Monty the Motorhome is one year old today and is celebrating his birthday on an Aire in La Rochelle.
Last night, in the vineyard, we saw lightening in the sky somewhere to our south. It must have been some way off as there was no thunder noise. However the storms must have been intense as it looked like small nuclear explosions. Luckily the storms didn’t come our way, though we did wake to a slight shower.
We stocked up again at the first Carrefour and then made for La Rochelle. Our ‘All the Aires’ book lists two places to stop in La Rochelle. One is in a municipal car park and is free, with places for 30 vans. We got there at about 1.30pm and the last place was just being filled. All vans looked like they were well settled so we moved on to the other site - an Aire that is part of La Rochelle’s Park and Ride. There is a charge (€10.50), but this includes the P+R to the city centre. With 50 places we didn’t expect it to be be full, but on arrival there were very few places left. However we got settled, had a bit of lunch, then in to the centre on the bus.
La Rochelle is known as ‘La Ville Blanche’ (the White City) due to many buildings being constructed from local limestone. I could have done with my sunglasses as the reflections were really bright in the sunshine (no - the forecasted rain has not arrived yet). We went around the commercial centre with it’s normal mix of shops and stores, before walking about in the harbour and beachfront areas. The whole area was busy with people, many of whom seemed to be students on their Freshers week - all in fancy dress and doing various pranks that seemed to involve shouting and alcohol. Oh how it took us back!
Back to Monty for showers - that is one of the advantages of this lifestyle - the van has such on-board facilities. Then evening meal - some sort of steak we had bought today called ‘pave’. Perhaps we should have researched it first, as fried up it was tasty, but quite tough.
A glass of Chinon red helped round the evening off nicely.
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