We spent the night in a room next door to a crying baby and it rained really heavily. P slept through the whole lot but I seemed to have woken up every five minutes. We had a late start and were perhaps unsurprisingly a little bit hungover.
We managed to leave at 11 by which time we'd missed the possibility of buying breakfast, but the hotel owner suggested we had a coffee in the bar (where people come to drink coffee, wine, eat tasteful bar snacks and gamble, like in lots of tabacs/cafes) and they also had croissants so we had a pain au chocolat and a nice coffee and they gave us €10 off our bill because of the crying baby.
We headed off and went through many scenic places and nice twisty roads, it was a lovely drive and generally a bright sunny day with only a very tiny bit of rain. We tried the motorway but it was windy and also boring, and it's much nicer to stick to the smaller routes. The late start meant we were pushing the end boundary of the official lunch period and presumably also because it was Sunday a lot of towns were shuttered up or at least shut but we found another gambling / drinking / fine dining bar in. P finally got his perfect goat's cheese salad and I had a goat's cheese tartine for research purposes and it was basically the exact same but on a large piece of toast. All very pleasant and tasty. Sometimes as people come into the bar they wish you bonne apetite which is nice.
The nearer we got to the coast the windier it became. It is apparently the tail end of a tropical hurricane which is currently causing problems across the South of England and the North of France along the path of the channel. It was very gusty but nothing (at least from P's perspective) alarming. We went down the beach when we got to Coutainville to see how big the waves were (big) and nearly got blown off the bike it was so strong. I was very glad not to repeat yesterday's exciting falling off moment and P's ankle is still very sore so I'm sure he was too.
We arrived at Manette's house which is not far from the beach. She is François' mum and Francois is Paul's brother in law, married to Mairead and they are the ones who live in Conneticut. Francois isn't here but Mairaid, Yves and Ronan are. Francois has several brothers and sisters too and one of them is also here at the moment - Claire who has 3 kids of her own, one with her called Leo who's about the same age as Ronan. We said we would camp in the garden but the house is pretty massive and Manette offered for us to stay which was a relief given the wind. There is also a very purry cat here belonging to Leo, here you can see him trying to nest in my luggage box. His name is Gary.
The others had already been to look at the waves so we headed down to the beach with Yves and Mairead and walked along the promenade dodging the spray where the waves were now so big and the tide so far in that they were coming onto the path. We found a restaurant and hadv enormous portions of moules and Yves had a salad with gesiers in (gizzards) which he enjoyed. He is an impressively gourmet child :-) We chatted about books for his Kindle and had a nice friendly evening. There is a house rule to not flush the loo in the night.
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