Sometimes in travel the biggest thing is to keep an open mind, not planning your route too much and then being open to change to your original plan. During October, this ethos had become really important in trying to find the best weather conditions to spend our last few weeks. In studying weather maps and forecasts we had ruled out staying on the Mediterranean Coast, heading to Northern Spain, the Basque Country or heading to Portugal. The West coast of France had looked the driest and warmest area, avoiding much of the worst weather from the brewing Atlantic storms. In Bordeaux we found this to be the case. Meanwhile in the Carcassonne area (the first place we’d experienced thunder storms and heavy rain in the van) the storms had caused the rivers to burst their banks and floods had killed 15 people. We saw the tragic impact and aftermath of this as we drove back through this area. You may be wondering why we had returned …… we were returning to the Mediterranean Coast.
Our destination was Nice, 803km from Bordeaux and the reason for this is was to see our friends, Lauren and Aisling who would be working in Monaco (just near Nice). But first Janet needed to catch a flight from Nice airport to Edinburgh for Lauren’s surprise hen do.
We decided to split the long drive over two days and the first night found an aire just outside Sete near Montpelier. Upon late arrival it was obvious that the aire and carpark was in a state of repair and we hoped the digger wouldn’t start too early the next morning. Unfortunately at 7am the digger started up and not long after there was a loud knocking at the van and we were required to move the vehicle. We dressed quickly and headed off down the road to eat our breakfast overlooking the sea. Then we drove towards Nice but took a detour to somewhere Pete had heard of called Le Sentier de Ocres. The area had been famous for ochre quarries and had a gorge like structure and ochre coloured rocks and formations.
The small hill top village was beautiful with houses that had been built using the varying colours of yellow, orange and sometimes pink coloured rock.
After this lovely diversion (and and very tasty ice cream) we continued onto Nice and just arrived in time to check into a great little, central campsite in Villeneuve Loubet Le Plagne which is located a couple of kilometres from Nice airport, just around a huge turquoise bay. So close you can hear the planes taking off. A great place to explore the Cote d’Azur from and a great sunrise on the way to the airport the next morning.
