9th June 2009

God it rained all night, torrential- the noise on the van roof kept waking us up. It was also very windy.  Paul was worried because we left our new draining cloth outside and he was worried about the table and chairs getting blown away and setting off the alarm (we have a wire link, which is part of the alarm system, that we can put round anything we leave outside, and if someone tries to move or steal something, the alarm will go off.) so he had to get up and check it and he brought the cloth inside.
So we left Nauzan Plage this morning and headed further north.  The site is lovely good pitches and all the wild life, but we've been here for four nights now and it's time to move on.  We made good time, so we passed on two sites that we’d earmarked as possible for tonight, and ended up a bit further north at Pornic near the mouth of the Loire River.
The site is called Le Pattiseau and although it's not as nice as the last one, the showers, dishwashing area and loo's are really good,unusual for a French site.  It also advertises that it has free WiFi and as we haven't checked our emails for five days we'll have to ask about that.  In the last site, you had to pay for the WiFi and we couldn't get a signal in the van anyway so we didn't bother.  Off to check out the WiFi now.  I didn't play AC last night so I guess my flowers will all be dead.
Just been to check the WiFi and it looks like we need to already have an Orange France account to be able to log in to their network as it keeps asking for a user name and password. The girl on reception said we should use our existing credentials but we don't have an account. They seem to be very backward about Internet access in France compared with what we get.  It's also more expensive than in the UK. Paul has to go back at 5.00 pm when someone who knows about it will be there.

Camping Le Pattisseau Reception

My shoulder and arm have been really bad recently, I can hardly move it now and the pain is awful at times, even when I'm asleep it wakes me up.  I don't know what to do about it though as I can't see a doctor whilst we are travelling.  A lady we met gave us some pain killers but they made me feel weird. We decided we’re going to leave tomorrow because there are dogs wandering about without leads and people keep cutting across our pitch to get to the toilet block, so bloody rude!

We watched TV after playing AC and had cottage pie for dinner made with French minced beef.  Not as nice as English ones though.  I had loads of wilted flowers on AC and it took me ages to water them all.