july news

Fun and excitement here at Camping Le Clarys Plage!!! Funnily enough our company that requires us to do next to no work to earn our keep has put us to work at long last. We are busy!!! Busy in the sense that we have every single ones of our annoying mobile homes filled at the moment. Ahhhh! We don’t know what has hit us. Good for the company though – we did wonder how they made their money with so few vans occupied at a time!

So, 45 filled vans…45 families on site…and endless problems as you could well imagine! It keeps us amused though. We are currently in the middle of potentially kicking a group of 6 families off the site 1 week into their 3 week holiday as there has been soooo many complaints about their behaviour and noise levels amongst other stuff like picking fights with the security guards! Tonight we had to go around and deliver an official letter from Mr Matthews himself saying if there are any further complaints they will have their holiday terminated. The lead man of the group went off as us about the official letter, and we fear he will rip shreds off our area manager when he comes to follow up on the letter today. Classic. We won’t be sorry to see them go though. I hope we survive the night without them burning down our van in retaliation!!! Ha ha.

Maybe it’s the heat that’s making everyone crazy and complainy. It’s certainly having an effect on us! How on earth we are supposed to clean vans when the outside temperature is 43 degrees celsius??? At that temperature outside, inside a tin van it must be way hotter than that. We have sweat dripping off every part of us. It’s disgusting! Once we have the cleaning done with we spend the rest of the day submerged in water – either in the pool, the cold shower or the sea. When not under water we move about lethargically trying to figure out if it’s cooler in the van or outside under the gazebo, these decisions taking place with a fan held up to our dripping faces yet having only the most minute affect. I didn’t even know temperatures like this existed! It’s crazy. People are predicting the heat wave will last through into next month too. Oh dear. On the upside, at least it’s not winter and freezing cold…plus we both have kick-arse tans!

Hope alls well with the all of you, wherever you are in the world :)

PS - trying to get some photos up and going but struggling for some unknown reason. Will keep trying.

June news

We are now well into the summer season and although work is starting to busy up we are enjoying it as much as ever.

On the work side, Matthews seems to finally be getting some clients through aour site and Dom and I have arrival cleans and departure cleans to do almost on a daily basis. Fortunately the guests keep pretty much to themselves and we don’t have too much to do with them which gives us plenty of free time to ourselves.

Some of the guests we get through are really coo,l polite families and some are the dirtiest human beings I’ve come across. We also get the obsessive and finicky. The other day we were asked to sweep the mud and stones away from a guys entrance way – in case it rained!!! ‘Sure thing’ we said though what was running through our minds was more similar to: 1) You are in the Vendee in a heat wave, the chance of it raining is pretty much nil and 2) Mud and stones, what do you expect??? You are on a campsite in a caravan! Ahhhhhh!

Onto other things. Dom and I are now the proud owners of a surfboard. Yey! For those who care it’s a 6.8 foot mini Malibu and blue and white in colour. Its beautiful (though not as nice as the orangey one I wanted but Doms facials said ‘no we don’t want that one’ – admittedly it was a bit girly!)

So far we’ve been out on it a couple of times, during the day and at night before a beach BBQ with some of our friends here. Its sooo much fun and although my muscles are so sore and tired and my knees are bruised I’m loving it. Dom too. We are both managing to stand as well so that makes it all the more enjoyable, progress!

Despite surfing, Dom and I are managing to fill our time in other ways too. We have now got free-view British TV in our mobile now – after days of effort and trying to converse in French to find out what parts we needed to make it work, not to mention trips to a zillion different supermarkets and hardware stores to locate the things! Yey. So nice to have the news and see Wimbledon as well as quite a few other channels.

Also in the recent weeks Dom and I have been lucky to have visitors from NZ over. His Dad was here for a week and my Dad and Frances and grandparents followed straight after. Was nice to hear lots of stories from home, NZ accents as well as catch up with people we haven’t seen in ages. It also gave us a good excuse to do a day trip to Nantes and another down to La Rochelle. We enjoyed both places. It’s nice to see a bit more of France than just the remote places we are living in!

Other than that, not much else is going on here. Right now we are eagerly awaiting our last arrivals of the day so that we are free to go out and down to the beach to…you guessed it …SURF!

This is the life!