Antibes

We had a bit of an eventful journey yesterday.  It all started well as we left the lovely campsite at St Tropez. We should have stayed for a few more days or at least till Monday so we would have missed the nutty French drivers who go extra nuts on the weekend.  I really don't know what their hurry is, they really need to chill a bit, but more of that later.

Our destination was the Cannes / Antibes area, so we plotted a course up the coast road.

I had an email from a mate in Oz who holidayed in the South of France numerous times back in the 70s.
He stayed at a place called   St Agulf.  Hopefully the next two pics are it ...

We carried on through some nice countryside ...

There was some low cloud around the Agar area, but still very warm ...

The road then followed the cliff face along the coast.  It wasn't as narrow as the Spanish cliff roads, but unfortunately the Frogs don't like windy roads so cut off every corner they can, which is all of them.  It was starting to really piss me off with cars coming around bends on the wrong side of the road.  Eventually it happened - some French twat in a motorhome of all things came round the bend on the wrong side of the road!  Bang!  The mirrors hit each other and mine folded in.  He started to pull in ... hopefully his mirror smashed - they are about £175.00 to replace!  Mine wasn't damaged so Elaine pushed back into place and we carried on. 

We decided to pull into the next campsite to sit out the weekend….the barrier was shut to the entrance to the campsite so we sat outside waiting.  A car came out so I drove in whilst the barrier was up.  The chap who ran the site was out in a flash with a mega attitude, telling us off for coming in at lunchtime!!!  We would have to wait an hour until he would be ready to serve us!   We had a look around the site and didn't really like it, but couldn't escape as the barrier was down.  A little while later his Missus came along and wanted to know why we were parked there.  I told her we wanted a spot for one night, she said they don't allow one night stops, super "we will go then"….we escaped.

There was a weight restriction of 3.5 tonnes on the beach front at Cannes so we had to use the back roads, which were rather grotty.  I should have ignored the the weight limit,we are only a bit heavier at 4.250 tonnes.

We found a site close to the centre of Antibes, but it was up a really narrow road, with loads of coaches parked up on one side and a ditch on the other, so not too much room to move!   Once again the barrier to the site was down, so I waited outside whilst Elaine checked in.  A coach wanted to get past so I moved up and squeezed onto a driveway.  I sat there waiting for Elaine to get the barrier opened, but within a couple of minutes some French women came out of her house screaming that I was blocking her driveway.  I said I wouldn't be long I was waiting for the barrier to open, but she went off on one.  She didn't want to go out she just wanted me to move I gave her the classic Gaelic response , I shrugged my shoulders!

Eventually the women from the campsite came and rescued me and opened the barrier.

It was not a bad site and we moored up right next to the pool. We decided to stay for two days, to chill a bit and in the hope that the Monday drivers would be a bit better!

We had a very lazy start today.  By midday we decided to walk to Antibes to check it out, but we had only gone about 1 km when it started to piss down with rain, so we decided to return to base and have a seriously lazy day.

Today's prom pose is by a drainage ditch just down the road from the site.  The site is located in a seriously dodgy area with a lot of pikeys down the road ...

  
Once back at the van we just lazed around and read.  I went for a swim later in the day as the sun returned with a vengeance.

This is our mooring, with Bombo trying to stop Elaine from reading, the pool is in the background  ...

This evening I went to the site bar to watch the Cloggers vs Mexico, I cheered on Mexico but was well drowned out by the squawking Dutch women!

The cloggers won…..it really wasn’t the best weekend!

Where we stayed:  

Camping Les Frenes, Antibes
Not a bad campsite - old style but friendly enough.  The road outside and the general area felt pretty 'dodgy' with lots of barbed wire and glass along the tops of walls.  There was a fairground going on while we were there, not sure if it is permanent or not, but pretty noisy.  In the ACSI book so it was 18 Euros plus 1.50 for the second dog!!  Wifi was 10 Euros for 3 days - or 7 Euros for 1!!

It was very rainy when we were there so we didn't do much but had we planned it a bit better we would have maybe gotten a train to Monaco ... we weren't sure about the dogs though, as Paul saw on an official website that they have to be muzzled !!!