Saturday 14 March - Capbreton (France)

Where's Bertie? After a big day of driving, he's sitting at the Aire at Capbreton at a cost of €10 (including electricity). He's been here before, on 13/14 October 2017.
Weather: I don't think we saw a cloud all day. Would have been a lovely day to be by the Mediterrainean...

The compromise position we reached last night on the stay/go question was to head up the coast to Peñiscola, book into a campsite and stay there, on a night-by-night basis for as long as we wanted or needed. That way we would have access to services, in a place that we're led to believe has merit for a long stay, without worries about moving around.

On that basis, we didn't set an early alarm this morning and I started my day exactly as I would have if the world was still normal: I went for a run.

I got back and had a leisurely breakfast, over which I saw increasing first-hand reports of campsites in nearby towns closing, ejecting all of their residents, and the police going around all motorhomes parked on Aires, car parks or in the streets and telling them to leave. I checked availability on the Channel Tunnel for later this week and a swift decision was made to head home.

When we hit the road sometime after 10am, the rough plan was to repeat our outward journey in reverse, which would have seen us cross the border into France on Monday.

By the time we stopped for lunch we'd decided to roll two days into one and reach Pamplona today. Then we saw that more countries had closed their borders, making more real the risk that France would follow suit. Suddenly it seemed an entirely sensible idea to cross the French border today.

What we didn't know at the time was that countrywide restrictions had been placed on movement in Spain, but it did explain why the motorways were so quiet. Many a motorhome passed us, fleeing north like us, as did some lorries, but cars were relatively few and far between. The southbound carriageway was quieter still.

Our only other pause was for diesel at a motorway service station (which was only 10 cents per litre more than the cheapest we'd seen off-motorway). Even though petrol stations are exempt from the general business closures, we were a little surprised to pull in and find the grilles pulled across the doors and signs taped to the pumps. We couldn't comprehend the signs, but we soon twigged that the station was open, with payment via the 'Night Pay' window.

A few minutes before 6pm we crossed the border into France, where half a dozen border control officers were standing in between lanes, just after the toll booths (we forked out for tolls the whole way today), but as far as we could see, weren't stopping anyone.

Capbreton was not the first night-stop we visited after crossing the border. The first place we went to in Urrugne would have been okay, but no more than okay; Capbreton was only 45 minutes further and we knew it would be nicer, quieter and less sloping (I'd forgotten at that point that you get electricity for your money here as well).

If it wasn't Sunday tomorrow, I'd be happy to stay here for two nights, as we're now so ahead of schedule that we have time to kill before our re-booked Chunnel crossing (although we could potentially move it again). However, Sundays are good for driving, so we will head further north tomorrow. I understand that some virus-related restrictions have now been put in place in France; people seemed to be going about their business as normal as we drove through today. I wonder if we'll notice such a marked difference over the next couple of days, as we've witnessed in Spain over the last couple?

^{(*Is that logical? You shut down all movement in and out of a place for the purposes of disease control, then tell hundreds of people who may have been in that area for weeks or months that they have to leave. They then move on to the next region, where movement has not yet been restricted, potentially risking greater spread of the virus.)}