Greenadder
After our 2 day journey in Euro Disney, we headed towards the South of France, Sète to be more specific
You might wonder what we end up over there. We usually go to the mountains in Switzerland or Austria, but the wife and kids wanted to go to the sea this time. I’m not so a keen beach visitor, mainly due to the fact that my skin type is not sun proof and get burned fast without getting brown. I indulged if we could find something where:
- the weather is predictable and stable (driving far for a rain holiday is waste of money)
- one can arrive and depart outside the WEs (the WE traffic jams during the WE in France are notorious)
- it must me an hotel (don’t wanna cook on holidays)
That didn’t leave much of possibilities. Most of the possible bookings concerned campings, resorts, etc. or hotels didn’t have enough space for the whole family.
As said, after making the daughter happy, we headed to Sète:
After a couple of hours, the daughter suddenly panicked because she couldn’t find her newest cuddle toy – a giraffe she got from her granny – anymore. She has probably forgotten it in the hotel room. So we stopped at an ‘Aire’ for a natural break and checked the hotel. The daughter was calmed down when the hotel promised to look for it. Meanwhile I found ”Autostop : A6 Sud – Aire d’Epoisses – Ferrovicache“ GC1GP0X, one of these typical French caches along a highway. At another stop we found another treasure: a giraffe similar to the one my daughter lost. It was even bigger. Daughter happy again and the wallet more empty.
Once arrived at Sète, I noticed two things: it was very warm (but not as sultry as in BE at those temperatures) and there was a lot of traffic. The latter had consequences on our stay in our hotel. Sète has two major roads and the roundabout connecting both was exactly at hour hotel. Add a music festival and you can’t speak of a tranquil stay.
Nevertheless, we had a good time. In the morning we went to the beach – where I searched for a spot of shade whilst the rest of the family did their thing – or went on a boat in the sea or salt lake. The latter was rather interesting, certainly when you see the oyster banks. In the afternoon we did other things like geocaching:
- Sur les traces de Gustave – 6 – Mer calme GC1JMGH
- Chapelle Notre Dame de la Salette GC17PPJ
- la forêt des pierres blanches GC10YMG
The latter two where on the hill of Sète which wasn’t easy to climb with that heat, but we managed.
I had even a close encounter with the Montpellier snake. Luckily it wasn’t really interested in me at all and vanished rapidly.
We didn’t really do much caches after all. There weren’t that many caches in Sète itself and we didn’t do the multis. Not that we wanted to, but I seemed to have messed up the cache details whilst transferring it to my GPSr. Secondly, we traditionally don’t use the car on holiday and the bus didn’t go to the places where there were more caches. We went to Montpellier one day, which is quiet an experience when you take the (overloaded and relative very expensive) train in order to get there. We arrived in a sultry climate, which makes it not pleasant for geocaching and thus only found “Komedie” GC1WWXC.
When we departed we made a small detour to “Marseillan plage: Le port de plaisance” GC1FTQB in order to head home (in 2 days) and picking up “AutoStop : A7 Nord – Montélimar (Est)“ GC16QHM and “A31 ‘Aire d’Entrange’ Metz-Luxembourg“ GC1VVAM. This one was rather strange. When I was logging it, I saw that Tollerteam logged it about the same time as I was intending to, but I didn’t see anybody doing this or leave. When I walked away, someone yelled: “Did you find it?”. We had a small chat and continued both our journey.
