WHEN WALKING

Home to Santiago – Day 42

Messanges to Labenne-Ocean: 32km

The one-week family holiday starts today and during the time it takes me to complete today’s walk, my family will be flying the distance I have travelled this past six weeks. Better get a move on.

After packing up the tent in record time, I leave the campsite just before the croissants are delivered. This is important as I had not ordered any, having told the owner yesterday that I would be leaving far too early.

In the nearest town of Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains, I take my coffee at the surf bar. It is a place of impossible tans. The dunes are just visible beyond the town’s large lake. The sea is in striking distance.

The market is being set up in the centre and people are already out and about, running, cycling, walking along the banks of the lake. Men have been out fishing for a while.

Then the walk continues, not exciting but pleasant, along more cycle paths, until eventually the path hits the surf coast proper. Shack cafes everywhere. Camper vans parked along the road, which runs along the land side of the massive dunes.

I’m looking forward to going to the first beach and touching my toes in the water, but it’s a naturist beach, and I don’t have enough sun cream and far too much inhibition. So I keep on, looking for a more English alternative.

Later, when I do reach a beach across the dunes, it’s as though the sound has been muted. The noise of the cars disappears completely, figures lie silently on the beach, or stand eyeing up the waves, which as they crash, sound far far away. I wonder if the sound is muffled by the sand dunes. It is like the world as heard from under the water.

I stop for lunch at Soorts-Hossegor. The parade of cafés and restaurants with views down to the waves is irresistible. I want to sit at a table on the terrace of a brasserie and be a tourist. A scruffy, grubby tourist with a big battered rucksack and a healthy appetite.

Walking off again in the stark heat of the beachfronts, I am distracted by the appearance of a larger man on a bicycle in teeny tiny trunks, and to my delight, written across his backside are the words “Budgie Smuggler.” He cycles by several times during the next half hour. I think he wants to make sure everyone gets the joke.

I give Cap Breton marina short shrift. I’ve got no time for places whose toilets are not open to the general public.

But Cap Breton Old Town is rather lovely, the church with a lighthouse for a tower, and inside, the most extraordinary paintings on every wall. The congregation of fishermen have very much focused on the maritime bits of the bible.

Problems begin a little later when the way leaves the cycle path. According to my app, I must definitely walk for half an hour through the exclusive campsite. No one stops me at the fancy reception. No one stops me in the staff accommodation quarters. No one stops me as I go past the various utility blocks and endless holiday homes. Even the bemused-looking German families by the tennis courts don’t stop me as I stomp through to the gate at the far, far, far end, and find it locked, of course.

When I get back to the entrance, I decide to find any road going in vaguely the same direction as the line I’m told to go on the map, and eventually, having walked around the perimeter of a small housing estate, I find a break into the woods and keep pointing myself in the right direction and follow a little path, right or wrong, along a river, which I know leads to where I need to go.

The entrance to my family’s campsite is not where it’s marked on my map app either. It’s a few kilometres further on, and even then the entrance isn’t clear. I’ve gone to the entrance to the spa, the entrance for the shop, and eventually to the main camp entrance, where I’m told, “Oh no, you need your special Eurocamp reception. It’s on the side of the site”

And so I go back, almost to where I started, across the whole campsite, and I seem to have managed to add an extra five kilometres to my day.

But as I walk up the lane approaching our cabins in the woods, I hear voices.

“It’s Aunty Rachel!”

And I see the figures of three children and an allocated adult, walking happily towards me. After six weeks on the road, home has come to meet me for some stay-put fun in the sun.

Normal service will be resumed next week. Those Spanish mountains look rather large from here.