Day 36 - sea swimming and aquagym

We’ve had a pretty busy day today! We woke up this morning pretty early thanks to our hairy alarm clock. I heard her take a massive drink just before she snuck into our bed last night, so thought it might be an early start for everyone.

We survived the weather overnight, the wind woke me up just once, so that’s not too bad. We had the mini air con unit blowing all night which helped drown out the noise of everything blowing about outside.

We wanted to hit the beach early for a swim before there were many people about. So about 8:30 we headed out, hoping we were finally following the right footpath! After about 10 mins we were rewarded with a beautiful little beach almost all to ourselves. We arrived at exactly the same time as a lady on a bicycle. She hopped off, stripped to a bikini, jumped in the sea for about 2 mins and then she left again. We put Marla in her life jacket (safety first!) and before I knew it Charlie had stripped to his trunks and was off into the sea. It was a little bit rough, and Marla wasn’t too sure about the crashing waves so she followed him gently but was soon having fun jumping over the shallow waves and doing a bit of swimming. There was quite a sharp drop off, so it went from shallow to deep quite quickly. Marla wasn’t a massive fan and neither was I. I paddled up to my knees but because Marla kept running in and out of the sea, I didn’t want to go too far in to leave her on the beach alone.
We did a bit more splashing, but I could tell she wasn’t having the best time in the rough sea, so we came back to shore and played a bit of frisbee on the beach while no one else was around. Charlie carried on swimming for a bit longer, then we all headed back to camp.

Once back we decided that Charlie was going to do some exercises around the van and I was going to go to the Aquagym class at 11. Charlie was just getting changed into his workout gear and suddenly we heard a lot of clattering by his feet. Turns out he had a load of beach pebbles in his trunks and they’d stay put the walk back 😂 Aquagym was a lot of fun, there was seven of us in total and we had Swiss, French, German and I was the only English. The instructor did everything in French and English, throwing in the only German phrase she knew every now and again “schneller” which means faster!

Back to the van for showers and lunch. We also did a couple of loads of washing (we know how to have fun 😂) but with the beautiful weather, everything dried so quickly saving us €5 as we didn’t need to use the dryer!

We went for an afternoon walk along the beach front but in the other direction than this mornings beach walk. It was an interesting mix of good, wide footpath and then sketchy steps up and down cliffs and beaches. Everything was going well until I suddenly got a sharp pain in my foot and had to stop. Turns out the blister that appeared in between my big toe and ring toe last night after wearing my flip flops for a walk had popped. I didn’t want to make it worse so we headed back, nice and gently.

Dinner tonight was some gnocchi and pesto, leftover baguette and some more flageolet beans. The gnocchi and pesto isn’t a combination we would be in a hurry to do again, but it was different.Read more