Enjoying the sunshine in Biarritz

The weather was back to hot and sunny today - very hot and sunny in fact. Our campsite is a couple of miles outside of Biarritz but although there was a bus available directly outside we decided to stroll into town instead. Biarritz looks a very moneyed town with an interesting mix of older holidaymakers (like us!) as well as lots of younger, fitter surfing type folks. It certainly looks like it'd be a nice place to retire to if you could afford it, especially with weather like this.

We started off by having a look round some of the shopping areas, which included lots of streets with market stalls selling a variety of stuff as well as one particularly nice indoor food market. As Fiona had misjudged the weather with her packing and come equipped for a Siberian winter she took the opportunity to buy another couple of summer dresses when we passed one of her favourite French clothing stores - Blanc du Nil. She's bought stuff from them before (including in Brittany last summer) and they specialise in white clothing. No doubt the dresses she bought will be making an appearance in later editions of this blog if it remains this hot!

After the shopping we headed down to the beaches, of which Biarritz has several - mostly huge. As well as the usual range of sun worshipers there were also lots and lots of surfers, at least partially because there appeared to be some kind of surfing competition on today. What impressed me was that while most were wearing full length wetsuits there were quite a few folks with very light, short wetsuits on - wouldn't fancy that myself as despite the air being very warm the Bay of Biscay is still likely to be pretty cold.

I don't cope quite as well with the sun as Fiona does (although I'm a lot better having spent a few years living in the Far East as well as having spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East in the last few years) so I decided to chill in the van with my kindle for a while when Fiona instead went and did some sunbathing on the beach that the campsite is adjacent to.

I've wanted to visit Biarritz for years and it didn't disappoint, however tomorrow we're planning to head into Spain, which will be the first time we've visited with the motorhome. We have been to Northern Spain previously but it was about 15 years ago when we rented a villa there for a couple of weeks. It'll be interesting to try and find some of the places we visited then again!