Where’s Bertie? He's at the Municipal Aire at Wissant, which sits about 10km down the coast from Calais.
An early start and a lot of focus had us on the road even earlier than our target departure time this morning, giving us time to spend a couple of hours with friends on our way down to Folkestone.
Under the sea we then went and with a chant of 'drive on the right, drive on the right, drive on the right' south we headed - even though our objective of this trip is north. The Aire at Wissant is known to us and it wasn't a big detour out of our way, so we took it as the easy option (I particularly wanted to stay near to Calais tonight as I have a bit of a shopping mission tomorrow and the huge Carrefour at the Calais 'Cite de l'Europe' shopping centre sells everything).
We visited Wissant in both March and November 2016 and on both occasions we were one of a small handful of vans at the Aire and the town was deserted. What a difference today! The sun is shining and tomorrow is a public holiday here in France. As a result, we took the penultimate space on the large Aire and the town is a whole different place to what we have witnessed before. There are people!
Taking a stroll on the beach after tea, there were still plenty doing beach-life sorts of things (sun bathing, boule, building sandcastles, etc) at 8.30pm - a time of day when we most cetainly wouldn't have been out on the beach if it wasn't for the time shift we've had today.
Unfortunately, I don’t have on my phone the version of the photo below that I took in March 2016. On that day we had insulating jackets under full waterproofs, with just our faces showing. Bit of a contrast today:
Without rain curtailing visibility we could also finally see the obvious distinction between Cap Gris-Nez just S of Wissant and Cap Blanc-Nez just to the N. The white nose headland is in this shot:
I didn't take a snap in the other direction of the grey nose, but it was coloured as its name suggested.
Bonus image. Mick wanted the car. To me the car and hotel combination made me feel like I had stepped back in time.
An early start and a lot of focus had us on the road even earlier than our target departure time this morning, giving us time to spend a couple of hours with friends on our way down to Folkestone.
Under the sea we then went and with a chant of 'drive on the right, drive on the right, drive on the right' south we headed - even though our objective of this trip is north. The Aire at Wissant is known to us and it wasn't a big detour out of our way, so we took it as the easy option (I particularly wanted to stay near to Calais tonight as I have a bit of a shopping mission tomorrow and the huge Carrefour at the Calais 'Cite de l'Europe' shopping centre sells everything).
We visited Wissant in both March and November 2016 and on both occasions we were one of a small handful of vans at the Aire and the town was deserted. What a difference today! The sun is shining and tomorrow is a public holiday here in France. As a result, we took the penultimate space on the large Aire and the town is a whole different place to what we have witnessed before. There are people!
Taking a stroll on the beach after tea, there were still plenty doing beach-life sorts of things (sun bathing, boule, building sandcastles, etc) at 8.30pm - a time of day when we most cetainly wouldn't have been out on the beach if it wasn't for the time shift we've had today.
Unfortunately, I don’t have on my phone the version of the photo below that I took in March 2016. On that day we had insulating jackets under full waterproofs, with just our faces showing. Bit of a contrast today:
Without rain curtailing visibility we could also finally see the obvious distinction between Cap Gris-Nez just S of Wissant and Cap Blanc-Nez just to the N. The white nose headland is in this shot:
I didn't take a snap in the other direction of the grey nose, but it was coloured as its name suggested.
Bonus image. Mick wanted the car. To me the car and hotel combination made me feel like I had stepped back in time.
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