A major spree, a minor swarm and other misadventures in France's South Yorkshire

The D339 wanders more or less directly south from Marmande to Oleron St. Marie in the foothills of the Pyrenees, a distance of about 150 miles. It's a second 'French Yorkshire' another attractive but needlessly extensive tract of flat countryside tucked away in the southwest, creating a pleasing, but entirely, spurious symmetry with the wheat fields of the northeast..

ever southwards, dead flat, dead straight...Gill tends to drop-off, but she must have been awake here...click!

Immediately south of Marmande we crossed the broad flood plain of the Garonne. Today the golden light of autumn bronzed the fallow fields. Leonard Cohen's line from 'Suzanne' occurred to me, 'and the sun pours down like honey'. The scene marked a moment of arrival, after days of driving southwards it was the point where I sensed that we had got there. We drove by a dun coloured farmstead shaded by a big umbrella pine. The fields beyond stretched away into the heat haze. Momentarily the landscape looked very Italianate, reminiscent of the eastern Po valley, or the broad plains of Puglia.

As we neared Les Landes, the countryside changed. More wooded now, we drove down avenues of golden leafed trees, the straight road creating a long vista which vanished into smudgy blue. Clumps of purple heather dotted the roadside and the bracken fronds were tinged with the browns of autumn. Under a bright blue sky it was all very beautiful. Sometimes travel is simply joyous.

It took longer than we had anticipated to reach our planned lunch stop, the E Leclerc hypermarket car park just off Mont de Marson's 'rocade'. The place was brand new, containing a big mall as well as the hypermarket itself, all swankily designed, a temple to the French obsession with 'le shopping'. It's difficult to understand how moderate sized towns can sustain such extensive retail sprawl on the outskirts yet their centres remain prosperous looking. Disposable incomes here must be higher than at home, I wondered if housing costs are lower. Conversations we have had over the years with people from Holland and Germany have led us to conclude that disposable middle incomes in those countries are higher than in the UK because house prices and rents are lower. Maybe it's the same in France. 

Whatever the reason, French hypermarkets only ever seem to get bigger. In a way their contradictions reflect France more broadly. The giganticism, uniformity and civic purpose reflect republican values, a contract between state and citizen. Though the scale of this particular retail monster, complete with a spectacular symmetrically designed central avenue leading to a majestic facade recalled Versailles - it seemed to aspire to majesty more than egalitarianism.

However, what it stocked, particularly in the food department, reflected a different France, a patchwork of unique localities nested within distinct regions. An area in the centre of the hypermarket had been cleared to showcase different cheeses. There were dozens of them, each a local speciality. French wine is characterised by similar localism too.

On our travels through France we have happened upon many examples of towns which have retained a speciality trade - Millau's haute couture glove makers, Pradelle's DOC Puy lentil producers and our visit to Neufchatel en Brey last year which happened to coincide with the annual cheese festival. The entire town turned out to celebrate the place's unique heart-shaped cheese Pride of place in the central square had been given to the local cows, prize specimens parked nose first into narrow stalls so townsfolk and visitors alike could admire the beasts' magnificent rear ends, particularly their spotless bright pink udders. 

We might find this mildly amusing, or a little odd, but cheese fest reflects the political structure of a centralised state linked to local institutions - a marie in each commune - a plethora of quangos promoting local products - localism celebrated through village and town festivals - all this gives France a solidity and shared identity that no longer exists in the UK, if it ever did. What we have seen in four decades of visiting France is incremental economic development enabled by a coherent, stable political system. Such centralism is an anathema to Brits, we don't like big bureaucracy, as recent events have shown. The final cost of our swashbuckling individualism is not yet clear, but it is worth reflecting that when politicians remind us that the future is bright because the UK's economy is the sixth biggest in the world, they tend to gloss over the fact that France's is fifth, and their population is a little smaller than ours.

On a more practical note, aside from my cockeyed attempt to re-imagine an E Leclerc hypermarket as a paragon of 'La Republique' our mission was simple, buy a baguette, use the loos in the Mall and have a quick lunch stop in the car park. However, life is never straightforward and a break that should have taken less than half an hour ended up taking over two.

Part of the reason was our own doing. We became hapless victims of IKEA syndrome. You know how this goes. Blithely heading into the store with the sole purpose of buying three LED light bulbs and some replacement cushion covers you emerge hours later full of meatballs, £210 poorer, trundling a trolley piled high with three different sizes of flat pack bookshelves called Billy, a new cover for an Ektorp sofa (50% off), a set of voille curtains and a random collection of plastic kitchenware with vaguely Nordic sounding names like - Mügins, Søftuch and Skint. Back at the car an animated conversation ensues concerning who should return to purchase the LED bulbs that you set off to buy in the first place.

Our visit to E Leclerc, Mont de Marson was a Gallic variant of the aforementioned retail meltdown. We went in for a baguette and a spray can of insect repellant but emerged an hour later with a 'chariot' looking like this.....

I suppose it's a fairly modest example of IKEA syndrome, nevertheless though the baguette and the bug-spray cost a mere €4.60, the final bill was more than twenty times that amount. The haul, as you can see, was mainly liquid in nature. The logic behind our minor spree was as follows. The van will be in Europe until next March, though we are flying home for Christmas. This means we must buy any French products we want now in bulk. This includes Lavazza Mattino coffee without which life is unbearable, available in E Leclerc at half the price than at home, and cheaper even than in Italy. A quick calculation - two scoops in the morning for our filter, then a Mocha pot full for expressos after lunch - we probably get through a 100g bag per week, so a four pack per month - we needed five packs to get us through the trip....

The same logic applies to beer. We are very particular about 'beer o'clock' - Leffe blonde 25cl usually, Goudale occasionally for a change (love the orange and coriander notes, but too expensive and strong as our everyday choice). The store had a buy two get one free deal on 20 bottle cartons. What's the point of having a cavernous rear garage if you don't use it? 

We even remembered the baguette and the bug spray. The latter purchase proved fortuitous. I mentioned yesterday that we had been inundated by brown flying beetles while parked overnight in the Marmande Aire. We are prepared for such moments, fully armed with an electronic bat that fries bugs, a swat for squashing them and spray cans to gas them. We had used all means to repel yesterday's attack, so much so that our chemical weaponry required replenishment. Sadly, as we unpacked our beer laden trolley it soon became apparent that the beetle swarm, far from being repelled, had simply gone to ground, hiding in the van's many nooks and crannies, and now as the afternoon warmed-up they re-emerged by the dozen. Gill, normally the most rational and level headed person imaginable, took this very badly, squealing every time she saw one and exiting the van at speed. Dozens crawled around the cab door jams, a small swarm appeared behind the fuel filler flap, the net blinds were covered in bugs. It was like a nightmare.

Luckily, unlike wasps or houseflies, our bugs were somewhat dozy, partly due to being armour plated, giving them the appearance of a thumbnail sized prehistoric monster. It was easy to pick them up one by one and squish them, but there were scores of them. I don't like killing creatures needlessly, but what other option did we have?

Finally, two hours and a half hours after stopping for a baguette and a spot of lunch we set off once more. It was a lovely drive from Mont de Marson towards the Pyrenees. The forested plain of Les Landes changed to more undulating country as we crossed into the Pyrenees Atlantique department. Soon it became positively hilly, the roads bendier and narrow at times. Old stone bastides clung to the hill tops south of Orthez. Occasionally grey mountains swathed in cloud appeared on the horizon. The area of the Béarn is a lovely bit of France, but little known. 

This should have made the drive delightful, but our thoughts were still focused on the ramifications of 'bug-gate'. Gill was feeling particularly doleful having come across a number of on-line accounts of motorhomes being reduced to piles of sawdust by the larvae of a particular species of brown flying beetle. The fact that all of these accounts seemed to emanate from over the Atlantic seemed to provide little in the way of consolation. For once I seemed the less catastrophically minded one. Nevertheless, I could provide no answer to the question, as how do we eradicate the little beasts from all the van's hidden spaces 

Lunchtime delays resulted in arriving bang on Oleron's Friday rush hour. The 'rocade' was packed with workers impatient to get home to start 'le weekend'. Sadly their progress was halted as students from the local college poured into the streets at the same time, heading for a dozen or so coaches which clogged-up the traffic even more. We edged through, camping 'Pyrenean Nature' was on the opposite side of town, it was destined to be a day of slow progress.

'Pyrennean Nature'  -  it's lovely...

Rarely do campsites get such glowing online reviews as Pyreneean Nature. The Acsi & Campercontact apps and Google maps all praised the place's generous pitches, excellent facilities and scenic location. It was all true, but we had little time to appreciate this as I crept about the van, electric bug-bat in one hand, insect spray in the other. Gill directed from a safe distance, 'There are two more on the skylight...one is crawling up the windscreen...have you checked the bathroom?' The hunt continued.