We woke up first thing and remembered it was Sunday…. and so our hopes of restocking the supplies in the van were zero!  I had to go for a 4km bike ride to find a bread shop which was open…. it needn’t have been that long but I got a bit lost, and took a detour.

When I returned it was worth the effort… If i had a sticker for best pastry of the holiday it would go to that shop! Yum!

We got ready and headed over to the pool.  When we got there there was Euro pop blasting out whilst a guy jumped about excitedly offering an aqua aerobics session.  Luckily after the session they kept the music going… as it was quite fun.

We had a chat with the guy that followed up from the aqua aerobics guy, his job was to do swimming pool games!  We decided that Mr Hargraves would  be very good in this role as basically it involved wandering around the pool chatting to people on holiday! I just read my book but stew and the children enjoyed watching the fun.

We got out the pool and headed back for a little time out of the sun.  Stew decided he would head over the the decathlon across the road, as we had only been to the shop 3 times so far in the last 2 weeks!  sadly it was closed.

We had a bit to eat and I washed some clothes and some other exciting jobs, and we got ready to head into the town.  It was more straightforward this time as we knew where we were going!  We weaved through the streets and parked our bikes by the marina.  We walked along the quay side in the sun and saw the harbour tower where the diving had been done from the day before.  All trace of the excitement was completely gone already.  We decided we would head up the tower to have a look how high it was.

The first interesting thing that we learnt was that La Rochelle had been an autonomous city, and went from being English to French a few times over the years!  The building itself was incredibly well maintained and restored, and was fascinating to wonder around.  It was both a royal residence and a defensive fort and had been built so the royals didn’t bump into the soldiers along the corridor.  It was the first building to have 2 spiral staircases so that one could be used as a service and the other for the residents.  Stew was impressed that this building technique was around a few thousand years ago and is still used now!  It was also used from time to time as a prison.

On the top where the diving took place the floor was uneven and the walls low!  I was terrified, and got sweaty feet in my flip flops and made sure that the children kept both their feet on the ground at all times.  I don’t know how they came up with the idea of even jumping off the side let along doing hand stands!!

Once our feet were back on the ground, we decided to hit the shade again and refresh with some cold white wine.  we ordered a small caraf of wine and sat by the boats.  The Scamps have been rather taken with the human statues at the various places we have stopped and there were loads in la rochelle.  So they spent a happy 20 minutes pretending they were statues before going and using their french to order ice creams and sat by the sea wall to eat them.

We had another wine and then got the bill and regretted it! it was nice wine though, and we learnt to look at the menu before ordering wine blindly or they might give you something which, though very delicious costs more than a meal for an army.

We walked back around the marina and stopped and watched some street artists, in particular a group of street dancers.  They were really good, and even though they had to pause a few times to let the odd bus through, they were very entertaining.  Fraser got pulled up from the crowd, and stood up for a few minutes looking nervous, before bursting into tears as he didn’t know what they were saying.  In the short time he was up there, the turners were walking past and looked over, thinking I’m sure that looks like Fraser!  So the children watched the rest of the show together.

After the show we headed for some food.  We picked a restaurant with a lovely view of the towers and chose the set menu.  The starters were an assortment of seafood and flame grilled prawns in brandy sauce, so we shared a bit of both.  Main course was steak with pepper sauce and the yummiest chips!  I don’t know how the steak in France always looks so rough and tastes so good… I wonder if its cut in an opposite direction to the UK?  anyway it was delicious!  For dessert I had cheese and stew had a profiterole as big as penny head, filled with ice cream!  It was an amazing dinner with a stunning backdrop.

We headed back to the bikes and cycled home. Straight to bed for all of us when we got back, and the children were asleep in seconds!