Sunday, August 13, 2006

Holiday Time
















Twenty eight years ago having saved up as much as I could from my £19 a week wages (trainee accountant wages compared to my £80 a week as student pork pie pricker) I set off with a mate from Weymouth for France. We ended up in La Baule, which was then in Brittany but has since decided it wants to be in Loire-Atlantique and for the best part of ten days lived on the beach, surviving on 50p a bottle red wine, hot dogs and waffles.

Last year Janis was looking through a brochure advertising apartments, cottages, houses etc owned by English/French people and there was an apartment in La Baule. Well. last years holiday was so good we did something we had never done before in the previous eighteen foreign holidays, we decided to go back to the same place.

La Baule has changed enormously over the last twenty eight years, well the sea front has, the town itself can't expand much as it is in a mile width zone between a TGV line and the Bay of Biscay, but it still boasts the longest single stretch of beach in Europe, it's the cleanest beach in France and it has more beach clubs for kids than you could shake a stick at.

Despite living only two miles from the sea for the past twenty odd years I had never seen a Comorant or a Starfish until this holiday. Seeing a pair of the sea birds from about twenty feet and literally dozens of the starfish in the water beneath my feet and on the beach at low tide brought out the Bill Oddie in me.

We had a great two weeks and it will be interesting to go back in another twenty eight years and see how things have changed again.

2 comments:

Lucy said...

Only two miles from the sea, sounds lovely.
Glad you had good hols and are now back blogging :)

Paul said...

Thanks - two weeks away was great.