xkerryw: Pyrenees & the Mediterranean

Sunday 12th May

We are currently in Montpellier, a city on the south coast of France. On thursday we did a bit of driving and whilst trying to find an Aire to stop for the night that we had found in our French Aire book we accidentally found a better one right next to a river which was really pretty, even though it was raining. We used the drizzly weather as an opportunity to try out the hob inside our van as we didn't fancy cooking outside. We cooked some pasta and all went well!

On Friday we reached a tiny medieval town called Martel. We parked up at a campsite and had a walk round the town and inside a veery old church that had bright patterns all over the stone walls and pillars inside. I'm not really one for religion and I don't know anything about architecture but I love old buildings! It was a very cute town. It was also soo nice to have showers and toilets on the campsite!

Whilst leaving Martel yesterday we saw signs for a place called Rocamadour and decided to have a visit and it was a town with a big church and castle built into a cliff face. The whole town was just sort of leaning off the edge a rock. We walked up hundreds of stone steps that apparently a lot of famous dead religious people had climbed on their knees as a pilgrimage and looked around the buildings. Very cool place.

We spent the rest of the day driving quite far as we wanted to reach the coast before the evening. The roads through the Pyrenees had amazing scenery. Through gorges and around mountains. We passed through Milau which has the biggest bridge I've ever seen. It was cloudy all day and sometimes raining but as soon as we left the Pyrenees and we were nearing the Mediterranean sea it got a lot warmer and sunnier. We drove through Montpellier until we were at the beach and we stayed along a road sheltered from the sea by sand dunes where a few other camper vans were staying over night.

Today was mostly spent chilling on the beach reading and walking in the sea. Adam got his mermaid on and collected loads of sea shells. He wants to make necklaces out of them. This evening as we were driving round looking for some free parking we stopped in an empty supermarket carpark to watch a group of 4 or 5 guys doing stunts on their motorbikes, like wheelies whilst standing on the seats or standing on the seat driving backwards. Then when we'd parked up just outside the center of the city we heard the echo of a guy on a microphone and a massive crowd cheering, went to have a look and caught the end of a big televised sports competition. They were just doing the mens BMX finals but we passed them doing wake boarding yesterday.

We'll probably have another look round here tomorrow before driving a bit further down the coast.