This vacation was over all too soon!
Returned from France this weekend, together with about a million other german, dutch and belgian tourists, the autoroute de soleil was crammed with cars packed to their roofs with bags, kids toys, inflatable mattresses and beach towels, but we made it, hooray.
France was fun like always, weather was fine, almost too hot some of the times.
We started off with a festival in the Cevennes the last weekend of July, lots of good music and nice people, but the camping site was absolutely crowded and incredibly dusty (no rain for a couple of weeks, and a high risk of forest fires), after a few hours I felt the dust had gotten everywhere, when I packed my tent after the weekend I couldn’t be sure it was mine because you couldn’t really make out the color.
We continued to the south of France, where we were supposed to take the sailboat that Grischa’s parents have there to Sitges, south of Barcelona. It has been in repair for the last couple of weeks and was supposed to be ready when we arrived there, but we spent another four days at the wharf at Grau du Agde, kicking the (irish!) mechanics to get the boat ready to leave. It turned out they didn’t get it really seaworthy, in the end the two mechanics took the boat to Sitges while we went there by car. They must have had a terrible time, one of the diesel tanks sprang a leak, the electricity broke down and fridge, toilets and shower did not work.
They arrived a day late, which forced us to look for a hotel in Sitges (in high season!). I guess we found the last available affordable hotel room in Sitges, and that was about the weirdest stay at a hotel of all my life. While we were standing at the reception, discussing the availability of a guarded car park, about a dozen very tanned young and not-so-young men in sexy swim-shorts and carrying beach towels passed us on their way out of the hotel (it was about 10 p.m. when people start going out), huge clouds of Dolce & Gabbana perfume wafting after them. You couldn’t use the elevator because it was absolutely poisoned with the stuff. I don’t think I saw a single woman in that hotel – oh, yes, there were two girls the next morning in the breakfast room, they looked a little lost, maybe they were stranded there the same way we were. It took me a while to discover that Sitges is something like a Mekka for gay Americans, sex tourists like all the men from Europe that fly to Thailand because the girls there are cheap and willing … it’s a weird world.
One hot shower later we were out on the boardwalk ourselves, the temperature finally sank below a 100°F and after sharing a spliff and a couple of fried sardines with Grischa I was able to find it amusing instead of disgusting.
We spent the next day in Tarragona and on the beach at La Mora, and by the time we came back to the Marina in Sitges our two Irishmen had finally arrived, tired and in a really bad mood. We soon found out the boat wasn’t fit to live in like we had planned, smelling of diesel and nothing working properly, so we spent the night on deck and took off the next morning, glad to get back to France. It’s strange, but after you’ve spent a week or more in France, everything in Spain seems ugly, the language, the architecture; the weather is sticky, the people arrogant etc.
So we spent another five days in France, enjoying the food and the beach and the weather, we were really sorry to leave on Saturday, somehow it felt like our holiday had just begun …
Now I’m back at work, but at least the weather seems to have followed us, the heavy rainstorms they had last week have passed and it’s clear and sunny and just a nice little cooler than in France. And now this little piggy is going to market, to find something for dinner that tastes a little like vacation, like a piece of fresh tuna and a nice ripe melon …
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