Our last 3 days here have been spent largely around the pool enjoying the hot sun. Mickey Mouse’s Head (the pool) has been a more or less private swimming place for us – maybe one or two other couples scattered about. We set up camp on loungers just across the fence from the end of our little garden so it is easy for us to go back and forth the house if we need to. The temperatures have been about 25-28C and very pleasant indeed. It really gets warm by about lunchtime – the mornings have just that “getting to autumn” freshness about them and the afternoons get steadily warmer. Dinner outside is still definitely possible long into the sunset. Some people are still swimming at 7pm but we’ve had enough by then.

We have ventured out a bit. We went to a massive Carrefour Hypermarket about 20 minutes away yesterday to get a shop of things to take back. We travel tomorrow and it’s Sunday so nothing will be open in Calais. I always forget this, being so attuned to shops being available 7 days a week. It seems so odd now to find a whole day when they are closed. No matter, the Carrefour was humungous. We stocked up on wine (for Daisy too), got some cheese, French flour (shall try bread made with it), tinned goods and a few sausages and packs of charcuterie. I never buy raw meat here. It’s much more expensive than the UK.

Bob played golf again yesterday and had his best round yet. No lost balls and no damaged clubs. He has found a chap near us in Kent who will reshaft his driver when we are out of quarantine back in the UK. He said he didn’t see another soul all the way around.

We have had an absolutely fantastic time here. It doesn’t feel like any sort of resort. It feels like we are in a small house in a village that just happens to have a convenient swimming pool. We don’t really have any contact with anyone. Say hello to the pool monitor and have a little chat. Someone leaves us bags of bathroom and kitchen supplies every week. We put the trash outside the door and it disappears. Likewise bags of sheets and towels. Fresh bags appear! I can imagine we will come back here again in the future. It’s a great area. We’ve spent 5 happy weeks here now without ever venturing into Paris or Disneyland. We’ve had plenty to do. So maybe next year we might come back, especially if flights are still tricky. Driving our own car here makes so much sense and it means we can bring things with us and take things back again at the end. Of course by next year we will be ex EU and Duty Free will once again be an option…..

Will blog again tomorrow to tell you how our trip home was. We have filled in our arrival forms online giving our details and where we will be spending the next 14 days. I have no idea why people have found this form complicated. It was utterly straightforward. At the end you have the option to print it or send it to your phone and also you get an email with the form attached to it in PDF format. We are stopping for lunch along the way at a little bistro we’ve located in a village near Beauvais. There’ll be food pictures……