Heading South

We finally started going south towards Spain, with goal of making it to Bunol, a little town right near Valencia, by August 28th for La Tomatina, a giant tomato festival. Right now we're in the lovely town of Longeville-sur-Mer, located in the Pays de la Loire region of western France. To date, this is probably my favorite area we've traveled to. And I'm not the only one who thinks this is a cool place, as the area is absolutely packed with tourists.

Cool little shack + attractive waitress = Lots of trips to the B & B

No Americans though. Mostly French, British, and Dutch. In fact, we went to a nice restaurant tonight run by a British family and they were so surprised to see Americans in these parts that the owner had to pry into our lives to figure out what the hell we were doing down here. We arrived in the area yesterday and last night we slept on the beach. We were planning on camping in the town of La Tranche-sur-Mer, but there are so many tourists here on 'holiday' that every single campground was full so we had no choice but to hit the beach. Fearing we might we awoken by the police in the middle of the night, we constructed a little bunker on top of a dune to try and hide from view. In hindsight this was widely unnecessary as gangs of teenagers were partying on the beach until early in the morning and the police could care less. The only thing that bothered them was when they saw me walking down the street carrying an open beer. I may have actually gotten in a bit of trouble but the officer didn't speak English so we mutually agreed that I would pour it out and we would go on our way.

Our beach bunker. It was more impressive than it looks.

Tommorow we have our first rounds of our next tournament in La Tranche sur-Mer. Frank and I are the 3 and 4 seeds and we are starting in the quarterfinals at 16:00. All 4 seeds are ranked 2/6 so I hope we can do some damage in this tournament. But because everyone is so damn good, I would certainly be getting ahead of myself by making any bold predictions. After this tournament we head to La Chatre, in the Centre region of France, and play a tournament on Sunday. Apparently the Centre region is famous for its castles, so hopefully we can check out a few castles on the way. The La Chatre tournament is capped at the 2/6 ranking, meaning no players ranked higher can enter, so Frank and I start in the semis. Again, here's hoping we can finally win some money. Not much else to report. Life is good. I should be able to blog again tomorrow night to talk about the matches. Later!

Frank napping this morning. He needs 10 hours of sleep to function and the beach did not provide that last night.

The campsite for the next two days. It was also laundry day. I hate laundry day.

-Max