28 July 2008

Jellyfish and Plan B

The holiday season is very nearly upon us now, with just over a month to go to the 'off'...

But exactly 'off' where?

Plan A, which was the original intention, was to go down to Annecy in the French Alps, then on to the Luberon to see some of the mountain top villages, a couple of days camping in Avignon and then make a bit of a slow loop round again to end up on the Cote d'Azur and Monaco, thus spending a fair amount of time loafing around on a pleasant beach somewhere in the South of France doing a bit of snorkeling and swimming.
The spaniard in this particular ointment though was that yesterday SWIMBO was perusing the BBC travel pages on t'internet and gloomily declared that the beaches in the Western Med were besieged with vast swarms of poisonous jellyfish, at a density of about 10 p/sqm! She then announced that if she goes on a beach and can't go in the water, yours truly is going to have a hard time of it.
Great!
Today then, we've got to start to think about a Plan B (I recollect that this happened last year) and in conversation over lunch just now she mentioned that another option is to drive from Metz (our overnight stop over) through to the Italian Lakes, which I have to say sounds quite pleasant. It does of course mean that we'd have to cross Switzerland again on their most excellent motorways and up and over one of four Alpine passes (or do a tunnel) but at least the way accross is not one that we haven't done before as we did it in reverse a couple of years ago.
In any event, we'll keep a close eye on the travel pages for the South of France and see what's happening just before we go, with any luck the slightly cooler weather conditions prevailing at that time of year might mean that the jellies have dispersed, in which case it'll be la Belle France for three weeks.

2 comments:

Marc said...

Hi Rob,

Plan B sounds fine. If you pass by Metz you're an hour from my workshop. Maybe you can pop in for a moment or two - I live in a wine region, celtic culture nearby in Trier, no jellyfish around...

Woodbloke said...

Marc - won't be able to stop on this trip but thanks for the offer...went to Trier a couple of years ago for the Christmas market, really good - Rob