16th October 2016. St-Tropez, France.

It was a lovely sunny day so we set out for the beach, we were aiming to move on to Hyeres today but I wanted to see the other beach before we went.

As we cycled down to the beach this morning we passed two people and called out “Bonjour” to them and we received a “Bonjour” back as we continued with our ride I said to Darren, wouldn’t it be funny if all the people we’ve said that to today were actually English.  A while later we got to the beach, padlocked our bikes up and stood reading the information board, we spent so long there that the couple walked passed us and sat down on a rock to enjoy the view.   As we walked passed them I heard them speaking, they were British!  I had to go and tell them we were British too because I thought it was very funny.  We ended up chatting to them for ages.  They live in the area for part of the year and when they’re in England they live not far from us!  What a very small world.

After a while they carried on with their walk and we went further along the beach for the obligatory paddle, it was getting very hot by now and we both felt rather overdressed in our jeans, most people were wearing swimming costumes or shorts.  The beach was covered with strange large squelchy green things, we’ve no idea what they were but there were an awful lot of them.

We walked round a corner and saw the restaurant that had been mentioned on Google so we wandered over there.

We were a bit late for coffee so we asked to see the menu.  The waiter pointed to a board with a lot of items written on it but it became embarrassingly obvious that everything had meat or fish in it AND it was extremely expensive (unsurprisingly as they were the only restaurant there).  When the waiter came back I told him I was a vegetarian and he just shrugged his shoulders and asked Darren what he’d like!  Funnily enough we didn’t think it would be a fun experience for me to watch Darren eating a tasty meal so we just had a glass of wine each.

We didn’t stay there very long and the waiter didn’t get a tip!

We wandered back along the beach along the springy mounds of vegetation over to the headland to have a quick look at the view before we cycled back to the van.  It was beautiful and I wish I’d bought a picnic so we could have sat in one of the secluded bays and enjoyed the view.  We bounced back to the bikes and went back to the van.

It was a lot later than we’d anticipated and our journey to Hyeres along the coast road was going to take about 2 ½ hours so we changed our plans and got the seats out and sat and read a book instead of leaving.

It was a good call because about 20 minutes later a motorhome arrived and a couple wandered over to look at the services, we said “Bonjour” and the lady replied “Hiya”!

We ended up sitting and chatting for ages, their names were Alex and Kathryn.  We had a lovely time but they’d had a very long journey and eventually as the sun went down Alex said he needed to go and make some food.  Kathryn kindly lent us their book on stops in Spain to look through so I went inside and started photographing it.  We were a bit low on food, we’d been hoping to go to a supermarket on our way to Hyeres so we rummaged around the cupboards and got out two tins of soup that my stepmother had thoughtfully given to us in our leaving gift, however there was a knock on the door, Kathryn had come over to ask whether we’d like to join them for dinner.  We were thrilled at their invitation.  We had a wonderful evening, they’re both great company and the food Alex prepared was absolutely gorgeous.  We’re very glad we didn’t move on to Hyeres today.