At 10:30 am Cécile and I stepped onto the catamaran to take us back to the mainland – 30 minutes of high-speed sailing across the Bay of Biscay.
And I still can’t understand why they don’t have a coffee machine or something on board. Not only are they missing a major income-generating opportunity (which is not to be missed in these days of economic restraint), how am I supposed to go for 30 minutes without one.
>With Cecile being here, I didn’t manage to re-read my A Night to Remember
I did however manage to retake the photos that I took on the way out to the island when it was obscured by clouds or something such, because the weather on the way back across was so much better.
You wouldn’t have thought so, though, if you had seen this morning.
At 07:30 it was miserable, grey, depressing and drizzling – a typical summer day of course, but slowly it managed to brighten up as we packed.
By the time Cécile’s mother’s next-door neighbour Catherine dropped us off on the quayside it was turning into quite a pleasant morning and we were looking forward to the journey home.
As the catamaran (which I forgot to photograph yet again) pulled closer to th mainland, it gave me an opportunity to take a photograph of the Pont de Noirmoutier.
Noirmoutier is an island and before the bridge was built, there was a ferry that set out from Fromentine. The bridge put an end to the ferry when it was opened in 1971.
What the locals considered to be “excessive” tolls led to all kinds of demonstrations, one of which was suppressed by a famous baton-charge of the CRS in 1977.
The tolls were removed in 1994 following a series of accidents to travellers who knew of the existence of a sunken road between the mainland and the island, but not exactly WHERE it was
Having paid a fortune to a licensed bandit to retrieve Caliburn, we set out through the sun for the journey home, but caught up with the rain at La Roche sur Yon.
By the time we reached Chantonnay it was a howling gale and tropical rainstorm and I felt quite sorry for Cécile who I had packed off to buy the food for lunch while I fuelled up Caliburn underneath an overhead canopy.
At least we managed to avoid being hit by a falling meteorite, a fate that befell the town 200 years ago, but nothing would surprise me in this weather.
After Poitiers though we drove into the sun and the rest of the route was in quite nice weather, which made a welcome change.
In Pionsat, Marianne filled us in with the latest gossip and there was also a music concert going on in the square. Had I not been so whacked, I would have stayed on for the entertainment.
Anyway, I didn’t need much rocking last night, that’s for sure.
