words by Williams

Sunday May 28

We decide to take the slow route to our next stop, Camping Le Moulin de Mellet, St-Hilaire-de-Lusignan near Agen, about two-and-a -half hours away.

Near Bazas we head through forests which look like they’ve been subject to serious fire damage.

This Al Jazeera report from August 2022 talks of more than 1,000 firefighters tackling the blaze that swept across the Gironde.

Much of the burnt wood has been harvested and there are huge piles of timber across a bare landscape. Must have been terrifying.

Maisie Waze has been behaving beautifully until we stop for groceries at a Super-U just outside Bazas, until she decides to put us back on the toll roads for the rest of the journey.

It takes us a couple of spins round the start of her route and a stop and recalibrate in the Super-U car park before we’re back on track.

We pass through a couple of pretty towns and villages and it seems clear that between Bazas and our destination the fires have caused much less damage.

We travel down straight country roads which have a bend or kink in them every few kilometres just to make life interesting - until that is we wind down a hill onto the flood plain of the Garonne.

We cross the river on what looks to be a fairly ancient bridge and soon arrive at our destination.

The former watermill is a lovely, quirky little campsite with goats and fancy chickens in a yard a the entrance.

It has a small cafe/restaurant, pool, decent showers and loos and neatly tended lawns.

Cal spends the afternoon sunbathing while I listen first to the Monaco Grand Prix and then the last day of the Premier League season at home.

There’s a brief hint of thundery rain and it’s muggy as hell. We’ve taken the precaution of bringing our Dyson air-mover with us, which helps us cool down a little.

Monday May 29

We’re not quite sure who operates it, but there’s a shuttle bus that takes campsite visitors into Agen. We think it comes from local social services, because the signage on the side tells us it’s for people of limited mobility. Looking at our group, it’s probably a good call. And it costs just over a euro each one way.

Agen is bounded by the River Garonne and the Canal Lateral à la Garonne. It is served by a railway station that has one of those massive yards with a dozen or more tracks between the town and the canal.

We’re dropped off by the station and told that we will be picked up at Quai 8 on the adjoining bus station at 6.15pm, giving us around five hours to mooch around.

We arrive just too late for lunch - or at the cafe we reached anyway, but we were offered a clafoutis desert which we both expected to be warm, but wasn’t.

Turns out, if we’d have turned left instead of right a few streets back we would have been up to our necks in cafes and bars serving food ‘en continu’ - that’s to say all day.

They’re congregated near the main covered market at the end of Agen’s premier shopping street, the largely pedestrianised Boulevard de la République.

Here lies danger.

We wander into the Galleries Lafayette just to see what we can’t afford, then find the Burtons store, which has stuff we can.

I go for a pale blue linen shirt, despite Cal’s dire warnings that I’ll only moan if it looks creased. They have a sale, so I go for a beige polo shirt as well. I’m beginning to see what Cal finds in this shopping malarky.

Agen is very hot. Having done the shopping bit, we need cooling down and look for the port de plaisance by the canal. Which we can’t find. We know it’s there, because we saw it.

We end up at the station for an outside beer, a rosé and a couple of jaw-busting baguettes at La Grande Brasserie. There’s still an hour or more until the bus comes so we decide on another attempt to find the port de plaisance.

If anything it’s even hotter. So, having walked in entirely the wrong direction in the first instance, we head back along the canal. By now we can see the port de plaisance and it’s really not so far, but it really is too hot.

Cal is not amused as we reach a footbridge that goes back from the canal-side, over the many rail tracks and back to within a few yards of the station bar.

We have another beer - inside this time - before heading off to look for the bus.

We walk past what looks suspiciously like the bus on our way to Quai 8. We’re joined by our fellow passengers of mobility limited even further by the heat.

The bus doesn’t move as 6.15 ticks by. The flies, the damned flies. And the drums… At 6.30 one of our group walks over to the driver to ask him if he’s our bus. Remarkably, he is. Nicely parboiled, we head for home.

Tuesday May 30

Basically spend the whole day at Camping Le Moulin de Mellet chilling and marvelling at the industrious owners Franck and Sophie who seem to be up all hours, doing everything. Sophie is probably the first person I say ‘bonjour’ to when she’s cleaning the loos and showers in the morning and one of the last to say ‘bonsoir’ after she’s been serving in the neat little café on-site in the evening.