Season of Mists and Squirrels Gathering Nuts!

11th September 2018

Montalivet Les Bains, Aquitaine, France

It’s so easy to lose a day of your life on the internet isn’t?

I’ve had a busy day doing some essential online stuff that I have been putting off for a while now and suddenly Whoosh there goes my day!

So, no retrospective travelogue today as they take quite a bit time to compose and write. I have to start with a distant memory and then work backwards and forwards from it and then go over it all again several times filling in many gaps and making corrections as my memory haphazardly and randomly retrieves all the salient information.

However, it’s anyway timely to post a bit of an update on life here at Montalivet over the last couple of weeks.

Last week saw a big reduction in the number of people about. All the young families completely vanished, presumably to get the kids fitted out with school paraphernalia prior to the start of the new academic year and the parents to finally return to work.

After their exodus a residue of retired and childless couples dominated the much reduced Eurocamper scene and the first surfing vans started to appear.

This week the overall numbers are well down and the town is really very quiet indeed. The Eurocampers are, if not exactly scarce, very much thinned out but the overall number of surfing vans and cars has moderately increased.

I tend to get a few of the surfing cars - they can go under the height barrier at the entrance to the forest whereas the vans can’t - venturing into the forest area where Amy and I have claimed a nice little spot as our temporary home but, in truth, they are really no bother as they spend their entire lives in, or right next to, the sea.

The weather continues to be exceptionally good with sunshine, clear blue skies and afternoon temps in the high 20s but I have noticed just in the last few days that autumn is creeping into the air at dawn and that the days are distinctly shortening at both ends.

The sun very quickly burns away any light mist or damp air and there is still oodles of daylight overall, but its a salutary reminder that a summer season does not last forever and that one needs to think about where one wants to be, come the dreaded winter.

And that’s a part of what I have been doing online today. I signed up for workaway and ponied out the upfront fee of 34 Euros (that’s a week’s worth of diesel!). I then had to create an appealing profile and subsequently trawl through a great many ‘host’ profiles to try and find potential matches for a potential workaway Tumbleweed and his dawg!

Eventually I found ten initial hosts to contact and I’m currently awaiting responses before I try any more. It all takes oodles of time though and I’m always left feeling very listless after hours of relentlessly staring at my device.

It’s partially why I don’t do social media as when I did try it, some years ago, I found myself getting overwhelmed with an avalanche of unsolicited ‘information’ and losing whole swathes of my short life trying to make some kind of meaningful sense of it all.

However, I do freely acknowledge that might possibly be more of a damning indictment about me and the company I once kept than social media per se!

Dear old Amy couldn’t give a monkey’s about any of it as she’s far too occupied in trying to figure out a way to climb trees and finally get after those darn nut gathering squirrels that love to taunt her as they pirouette through the forest canopy!

Dallas, Texas

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Amy and I travel on a shoestring - and its a thin shoestring at that! - So, if you enjoy reading about our travel trials and tribulations and would like to make a small donation please do! Amy will be particularly pleased as she is very fond of her daily dinner. Woof!

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