Thursday, to La Palissade

After a windy night the day turned out to be, yes, hot and sunny again. There was a little pleasant and cooling cloud in the morning, but the afternoon and evening were full on, heating turned up to full whack. In order to avoid scratching like flea ridden mongrels, we are both regularly anointing ourselves with antihistamine cream; the Camargue mosquitos are vicious. Chris has one bite that he swears is a vampire bite, but he hasn't started shimmering yet (in-joke). They introduced a fish from Florida into the lagoons that was supposed to eat the mosquito larvae and reduce the problem, the fish liked it here, the egrets loved the fish, but it didn't reduce the number of mosquitos.
We drove around the Etang de Vaccares, right to the other side. It was a very interesting drive through Mediterranean wetland landscape. We saw water in the form of lakes, canals, ditches and later the river Rhone itself on either one or sometimes both sides of the road, with the reeds that grow so prolifically fringing the banks and the verges. There was great birdlife too, plenty of the flamingos we are now used to, pink flamingos, they call them 'flamants' here. We stopped at the Centre of Information of the Reserve National of Camargue. We had a walk of around a kilometre and a half with hides every so often. Chris tried hard to photograph an exceptionally lovely butterfly, large and plentiful, but constantly on the move and always closing its wings the few times it landed. He didn't manage to get it. He also tried hard to capture the one cattle egret that still had a yellow mop of feathers on its head. But the bird was perched in a frothy, frondy bush and was engaged in giving itself a lengthy and thorough pedicure with foot massage and full toe and ankle preening, in short, it kept its head down.
The next time we stopped properly, other than to take photographs which we did a lot, was at the observation area for the salt pans at Salin de Giraud. Lorries were scraping up the salt from the dry pan beds and filling other lorries which shuttled back and forth between the salt pans and two salt mountains. It was possible to buy a kilo of salt for 3 euros at the works.
We had our baguettes and cheeses for lunch at the observation area along with another of the wicked almond pastries.
The end of the line for us was La Palissade and beyond to the shore of the Mediterranean, at the point where the Rhone joins the sea. Lots of motor homes lined up along the shore, and further along an area with motor homes and caravans that looked run down and scruffy. We had left Rosie May looking towards the river, over a lagoon with a noisy colony of Sandwich Terns, splashing and squabbling together in the sunshine.
Back at the site, we were both surprised to see someone had parked their van in our space, even though we had left it clearly marked, and our water carrying things and marker had gone, too. Not a pleasant return, till we realised we were looking in the wrong place, and our space was in the next bay along, behind the hedge. We were greeted by two English vans parked opposite to our real space, newly arrived and both identical to ours, friends travelling together. Same make, same year, but named differently as theirs were from the next and last batch of Autocruise vans, just before the company was bought out by Swift. We all congratulated each other on the excellence of our good taste, wisdom and general perspicacity in making such an enlightened choice of vehicle.