28th November

Chores Nov 28

While French shopping hours were similar to Brit­ain, banking hours seemed rather strange. We needed cash this morning (Monday), but the banks were all closed; travellers checks could be changed in post offices in large towns. This was a small town and we were told to go to St Nazaire, the next city. We got there with the petrol gauge looking worryingly low, but at least the banks were open. It seems that outside of large cities the banks are open Tuesday to Saturday, in the cities they are open Monday to Friday.
In another small town, the manager one of the banks had looked rather vague when I asked to change a cheque. He hunted around in a few drawers, then admitted defeat. His computer had broken down and he could not cope without it; would I please go to another bank across the road.
Launderettes were another problem ‑ I got plenty of practice at asking people if they knew where a launderette was, and then trying to follow the directions they gave me. Often, however, launder­ettes just did not seem to exist, and we were left to do the washing by hand in a campsite.
Open campsites also often eluded us ‑ but that was an expected hazard of travelling in mid‑­winter. We could have a wash of some sort in the camper, but we did occasionally need a proper shower. However, it was still frustrating to waste much time and petrol looking for places that the AA book said were open all year. I even tried phoning a couple to see in advance if they were open ‑ I hate phone convers­ations in English, never mind another language, fortunately all I needed were simple yes or no answers. Local tour­ist offices were no help, they were all closed, either for the winter or just for that day. There was even one with a 'back in five minutes' sign on the door, and that was still closed an hour later.
For the most part we used supermarkets or hypermarkets for shopping. The hypermarkets were usually situated in commercial zones on the out­skirts of large towns, with plenty of parking space and often a petrol station too. The price of petrol was quite variable, and we often filled up at one station only to pass another a few kilo­metres up the road with petrol at five pence a litre cheaper. After a while we realised that the cheapest petrol was to be had at the hyper­markets.
Most of these hypermarkets had the wandering shopping trolley problem sorted out. To get a trolley you put a F10 coin in a slot in the handle in order to release it from the line; when you have finished with the trolley you chain it to the line and in the process get your F10 back. There was no problem of trolleys being abandoned either in the middle of the car park or in the nearest river.
Inside the supermarkets there was usually a good range of fresh and frozen vegetables; the meat counters held a variety of produce including horse-meat and veal ‑ it is something I suppose we'll get used to; we could even afford the lux­ury of a glass of wine with our evening meal ‑ cheap red plonk, usually from a cardboard box or plastic bottle, was a quite acceptable. A notable omission from the supermarket shelves was peanut butter, and Jim was getting withdrawal symptoms.
France is on central European time, an hour ahead of Britain, so here on the west coast day­light arrives at about 7 am but it does not get dark until after 6 pm. We can get up a dawn and feel quite civilised about it.
After what seemed like a wasted morning of mundane chores, we moved on again. We crossed another huge suspension bridge, this one over the mouth of the Loire. The light was too grey to make out anything on the mudflats below, and the weather too raw for us to want to stop on the south side and walk back for another look. We stopped for a late lunch at St Michel Chef‑chef overlooking the Bay of Biscay where Jim said there were hundreds of great-crested grebes and very little else.