… I spent the night. The “Grain de Sable” in Ares. So called because all of the walls are lined with bottle containing sand from different beaches throughout the world.

A little on the expensive side, but you would be surprised how difficult it is to find any hotel here in this tourist area, never mind one that is open. Camping and chalets and flats seem to be the order of the day.

But you can see what the weather was doing. Cold, wet and miserable. It caught me up during the night. But not as cold, wet and miserable as last night in the mountains of Nova Scotia where I wqs picking up bits of the Swissair flight that blew up over the Atlantic just offshore from Halifax. Must have been a strong jetstream to get aircraft parts onto the mainland, that’s all I can say.

I had a slow, leisurely drive all the way around the bay and to the town of Arcachon. There I was disappointed as it really is a “twee” place. No chance to park as firstly the weather was so bad and secondly, parking is very strictly controlled and it wasn’t easy to see a space, let alone reverse into it seeing as how the streets were so narrow (well, they weren’t – it was just that the roadway was deliberately narrowed so that pedestrians would have more room to walk about, not that it stopped them stepping off the road in front of the traffic without even looking or caring whenever the fancy took them. How was it who once famously said “There are two types of pedestrian – the quick and the dead”?)

I did stop a few miles out of Arcachon because I reckoned that from there I would be able to see the Cap Ferret lighthouse across on the other side of the bay.

So there you are – that’s where I was yesterday afternoon. Round by the lighthouse across the bay.

And you might have noticed that the weather has improved sightly too.

As you come out of the bay and hit the Atlantic coast, the effects of the currents going in one direction and the wind blowing in the opposite direction has created some immense sand dunes, such as this monster dune near Pyla sur Mer. It’s enormous.

I was going to have a close look at it but it’s all fenced off until you come to the car park, which is a “pay to leave” car park with ticket control, automatic barriers and the like. I did a U-turn and drove out of the entrance – I’m not being caught for parking like that.

Next stop was Biscarrosse Plage in Les Landes. Odds-on there being loads of hotels here seeing that this is one of France’s major unsung holiday resorts.

But why it is unsung is that there are in fact only 5 here (and a couple of enormous camp sites) but none is open. And not only that, there isn’t a single open boulangerie in the whole town.

The beach is closed too, but there’s a reason for that. There’s been a howling gale blowing here for the last month with enormous waves. This area is the neck of the funnel that is the Bay of Biscay and the whole of the Atlantic Ocean is trying to fit into this little coastal strip. There’s nothing out there until the south-eastern seaboard of the USA. IMpressive, what?

So with no hotels, no bakery, no nothing, I drove on and on and now I’m in Mimizan Plage where not only is there a little democratically-priced hotel but also a Morroccan restaurant that has made me a delicious vegan couscous.

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