Lunch at the seaside - yet again.

We opted for the Villerouge-Termenès-Albas road this morning.  We hadn't noticed the trials bike track shortly after the junction at Villerouge, and presume this was an investment by Kate and John, who like this road - we could visualise them leaping over the humps on their Mobylettes Pegasus and Bucephalus respectively.  More motor sport further down: we came round a bend to meet a net stretched across the road by a couple of old hippy types.  They obligingly hoiked it out of our way, nattering into a walkie-talkie (NB: French translation is talkie-walkie.  You might predict it, não é?).  Curiosity suitably pricked, we interrogated the next w-t/t-w wielder, who told there that there was a racing car coming up, but not to worry: they wouldn't send it off till we'd gone through.

At the end of the section, we found the arrêté municipal ordering the closure of the road for 15 minutes at a time between certain hours on specified days.  Plus a gaggle of identically-uniformed VW Motorsport technicians poring over a small vehicle normally originating from the Mladá Boleslav factory (among many others) but in this instance almost certainly  breathed on vigorously in Wolfsburg.  Their French minders approached us to say 'photos interdites'.   'Par qui?'  'Volkswagen.'  'Pfff...'.  Damned if I'm going to be told by a bunch of teutonic grease monkeys where I may or may not take photographs in my back yard, specially since I'm a customer of theirs, and have myself been doing a bit of VW Motorsport lately.  Said French minders were somewhat in tune with my f***-em attitude: I'd love to have poured them a few pastagas and found out how they felt about their employers.  Anyway, the little car burped and farted off the mark, but once it was up on the cam, it sounded like a receptive alley cat on LSD. 

Lunch was something of an anticlimax.  Martyn's entrecôte was broadly OK, but my moules marinières were grotesquely over salted, and went back.  The replacement shark steak was a bit ho-hum, and swimming in oil.  Guess the usual chef had phoned in sick.

We paddled gently in a warm sea, slightly disappointed that we hadn't brought swimming togs.  The wind-surfers and kite ditto were entertaining, though more so from the restaurant as we lunched than when seen from closer quarters.  But to be in shorts and at risk of sunburn in mid-September is not to be sneezed at.