Friday 11th July - Mametz to Le Touquet, Berck, Fort Mahon, Baie de la somme and Le Crotoy.

We make a beeline south-ish to a campsite at Le Crotoy where we hope the weather will be better. We are so anxious to zoom away from the weather that we break our cardinal rule and don’t stop to get another bottle of gas, booze, fags, food, water or anything really. Major error, especially as it is a Saturday. Do we never learn??? We drive through Berck whose population more than live up to the name of their town, nuff said, we pootle down towards le Crotoy and it seems to be a general theme in this neck of the woods, what is wrong with the people around here???? We find one nice town called Rue (ironic when you consider the rest of our day) and we detour for supplies. On to Le Crotoy and our campsite. It turns out to be rubbish. We get as far as trying to park Valerie on a hopelessly inadequately sized pitch and just bail. If people don’t have the right facilities then they should explain to you on the phone when you ask them specifically if they do. GRRR. We go in search of Aires, this too turns out to be catastrophic. Nasty aire, Spartan, cliquey, unsheltered, dunes to the front with no view, brick wall/housing to the side and a roundabout to start. Nice. We park up briefly to let the poor dogs out for a blast on the beach – after all we were reliably informed that this is one of the most beautiful beaches/nature reserves in the world. They lied. We leave.

Sometimes you just have to go with what you know so we hare it back up the coast, past Rue, past Berck, past Fort Mahon etc etc all the way to Le Touquet, where we limp into the campsite on our last legs. Amazingly they recognise us and without further ado we are ensconced and collapsed. La vie est belle again. Phew.

We pass a couple of very pleasurable weekend in Le Touquet, despite the fact that peak season is more definitely upon us. The place is packed. Turns out Norm isn’t very good around this amount of people and noise, it makes town a bit difficult. We manage a meal out though, in a back street restaurant that we suspect may be an undiscovered gem. Can’t remember the name though – maybe all people have this problem hence it’s anonymity. Still, the weather is holding fair and the beach is glorious. Miles of sand for the dogs to tank about on cos everybody else is at the (dogs forbidden) end watching all the cool kite surfer types. We feel very un Point Break sure in our knowledge that Moo would eat their boards and Norm would eat their kites. (note to self, MUST get Norm on the body board thingy!).

There is a big fireworks display and music on the beach on the Sunday, but the weather is overcast and cool and it doesn’t start until 11pm; we are cosied up in bed by 10pm and glad of it. Have we turned into humbugs? Tomorrow we are off to stay in what looks like a really beautiful aire in Boulogne. Fingers crossed the sun shows his face again….