Monday Morning in a Motorhome at Stella Plage

Yep, we’re still at Stella Plage folks, our fifth day here and time to roll! The motorhome aire doesn’t have any signed rules, but it is popular and all 20 spaces have been taken each night we’ve been here. A steady set of vans turn up each day, some finding a space, some having to leave, so we’ve taken up a spot by the dunes for long enough. We’re also getting low on water, and the usual splash-and-dash shower method’s been further reduced to a rub down with a wet flannel. There is a service point here, so we could top up our water for €5, assuming we could then get back into a space. It’s so popular other vans using the services have deployed the patented spouse-in-a-chair technique to keep their spot. It’s been raining on-and-off these past few days, so that option’s out!

So, what do we do all day? Good question! Our Australian friends Rose and Paul named the Autotrail they lived in for a three-year tour of Europe ‘wher’dmadaygo’, which always makes me smile, perhaps as it’s so true. It often gets to the evening and we too wonder where that day went! In earlier touring years the answer would have been different, with hours taken up researching where we were, seeking out the next place to be and driving to it, moving most days, looking, tasting, learning. These days we’re FAR more relaxed/lazy on our tours (although I’m certain we have PLENTY left to learn!). Maybe we’re just getting on a bit, but we both enjoy this chilled-out way to wander.

Anyway, I’ve dodged my own question. What do we do? A mixture of stuff. We both run, most days for me and every other day for Ju at the moment. We’ve a yoga mat, elastic bands and kettle bell too, so we can do ‘static’ exercises alongside or inside the van: press-ups, lunges, planks, squats and the like. I tend to do mine outside and can recall seeing other van-dwellers doing this in the past and thinking I’d never have the confidence to exercise like that in public. Not these days. The headphones go on and I get going, I enjoy the sensation of using my body. 

We also write. At the moment we’re slowly gathering our thoughts together to flesh out our free Funding Freedom mini-guide into a full book, talking about how we came to ‘retire’ at 43. Yep, it’s still in quotes as some folks might argue we’re not really retired if we’re still writing and selling adverts or books. My answer to that: I don’t really mind whether we fit into a ‘standard’ definition of retired or not, that’s fine with me, but compared with my old lifestyle, I’m as retired as they come! Take this morning. By now I’d have driven to the tram stop to drop Ju off for her commute into Nottingham, then onto work, getting in early to get a parking space, and been at my desk for 8:30. I’d have a full day of running project meetings, conference calls, presentations and conversations with suppliers. I’d project plans to update, budgets to track, stakeholders to explain problems to, and a hundred details flowing around my head. I can feel my stress levels rising as I think about it. The biggest problem I have this morning is where we should drive to next. Yep, I’m retired! 

There are a few Brits in the aire too, and we had some good chats with our neighbours Andy and Trace with their two lovely spaniels (blogging with humour on Facebook at Travels with my Cocker). Something about this kind of life: it introduces you to folks you’d never normally meet. Andy used to write music commercially in his own studio, creating tunes for TV programmes and the like. He explained how you get paid per minute of air play for music, so if you happened to hit it big back in the day, getting music onto a popular show which aired a lot around the world, you could have done very well indeed. These days young musicians will literally work for nothing; times continue to change eh?

Stella Plage is a pretty quiet place out of season (other than the motorhome aire!). The shutters are down on the apartments, the single beach bar only opens at the weekend and the ice cream/waffle van only did a stint on Saturday (Ju was there in a flash). The town itself is set back from the beach and has a small supermarket, lots of estate agents and various shops to browse for an hour or two. The action, what there is of it in May, is down on the sand. The sea comes in close, bringing shells, crabs and sponges up to an endless bedraggled line. When it goes out, it does it in style, leaving a good quarter mile of beach exposed. At the very edge of this low tide I’ve spotted locals stood, foraging for something.

Curiosity got the better of me the other day and I pulled my boots off, rolled the jeans up and walked out to a no-doubt-freaked-out bloke in the distance. When I finally reached him I found he was burying one end of a net in the sand. The other had floats attached and he explained flat fish would get trapped under it as the tide came in. My French wasn’t up to asking him whether he stood about waiting for the fish or left the net overnight, plus I was still trying to process the type of fish. I thought I heard ‘lune de la mer’ until I got home and found that particular fish is roughly the size of Geoff Capes and thus unlikely to be restrained by the hairnet laid out on the sand. Aside from the flat-fishers, kite surfer and land yachts make the most of this area’s famous wind (the aire’s well-placed behind dunes to protect us). People jog and walk the beach, some heading up to the more famous Le-Touquet-Paris-Plage, two or three miles north. Only a single nipper’s made it out for a swim in the Channel and we imagine the weekend lifeguard was a tad bored, although we’d spotted him earlier dragging a big box into his airport-tower lair, so hopefully he’d some new gadget keep him occupied.

We cook, of course, which takes a while with only a hob, there’s no microwave, no grill, no oven, no slow cooker, no food processor in here. It’s all done by hand, which we really don’t mind. We’re off-grid at the moment too, so are using our on-board batteries and solar panel to supply electricity. When we’re at a campsite we sometimes hook-up to the mains and deploy our Remoska cooker, which lets us bake stuff and frees up some time for more intense (**smiles**) activities (reading, listening to music etc).

After that, we watch a bit of telly, Ju’s charity shop DVD collection’s been raided already! The slow life in a van’s not bad guys. Right, we’d better go or it’ll be a full week stood still before we know it!

Cheers, Jay