La Rochelle

Firstly we want to announce, we survived the heatwave...Just! After spending an unexpected 4 days on a campsite to try and wait out the heatwave which exceeded 40 degrees for 3 days straight, we finally made it to La Rochelle.

Before I get on to La Rochelle I would like to mention that the camp site we stayed on, Camping L'ile Cariot, was great and we met some absolutely lovely people there. It was our first proper interacting with British people for over 2 weeks and I think we chewed the ears off anyone with a UK sticker on the back of their car/motorhome. We would like to wish anyone we met on the site safe onward travels and a lovely time on their trip!

After we left the campsite and the heatwave behind us, we finally made it to La Rochelle. We walked all around La Rochelle and took in the sights but were overwhelmed with the amount of British and American tourists there were. We had just gotten used to the French lingo when walking in to shops and now we were being greeting with 'Hello, can I help you? rather than the 'Bonjour Monsieur/Madame' we had become accustom to. As a a weekend city break I really believe that La Rochelle would be amazing, But with the Tourist prices and large crowds we just simply were not feeling it. La Rochelle is beautiful there is no denying that but when your on a budget and have visited numerous other cities on the way, I think it fair to say that we were both just feeling a bit fed up and wanted to escape.

One of our biggest issues with La Rochelle was it just was not campervan friendly either.  There is places to park but they aren't the prettiest and you tend to have to pay, which is totally fine for a couple days but we ended up being stuck in the area for 3 days due to UPS messing us around with a parcel we needed to receive.

It's worth noting no vehicles longer than 5m with a width greater than 2m can enter La Rochelle in the months of July and August.

Before we left for France a few things hadn't arrived yet and we needed them for onward travel, I researched and UPS did next day delivery for small packages from UK to France via their 'UPS Access points'. The parcel was supposed to arrive on Monday 20th June and it had gotten to Tuesday 21st evening and we were literally watching the Parcel on the Tracking app, go from Manchester to Tamworth, Tamworth back to Manchester and then back down to the East Midlands. After numerous calls to UPS originally they would not let me change the deliver to address to another area. On the Wednesday the app then let me request an address change, but then this needed to be confirmed.

This was becoming a right palaver, and in the words of Ellie 'I feel like I'm being held at ransom by UPS'.

I know what you are thinking, they're are worse places to be, but it is really difficult to sleep at night in La Rochelle. The places tend to be busy and noisy so you don't get the best nights sleep.

On Tuesday I could see Ellie was getting fed up now, there wasn't much to do that didn't involve money, we had walked around endlessly and I know sometimes you just have to throw the budget out the window and just go out for a nice meal and get drunk! We Drove 20 minutes south of La Rochelle and found a spot for the night on the sea front in town called 'Chatelaillon', It was a lot less touristy there and had a lovely promenade full of restaurants on the beach. So we walked down the front, found the first nice restaurant we came across and had a lovely meal followed by a few bottles of wine. This night really relieved the stress for us both, we were feeling much happier and we had come up with a plan!

We woke up Wednesday morning  (with a sore head), requested the change, UPS customer service were no help and we just decided 'sod it lets go, we will sort the parcel out later' Luckily UPS excepted the change of address when we were 100miles south of La Rochelle and everything worked out!

My conclusion on La Rochelle is, it is a lovely place for a weekend break, but not ideal in a campervan. I am glad that we went and visited but the whole UPS ordeal just seemed to pull our mood down. So I think the visit was more our opinion based and we would definitely recommend going to visit, maybe just not in a camper.

Following all the city's we had visited, we had a change of plan for the next leg of our journey, which you will be able to read about it in the coming days!