St Marc and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot

The point of this French trip, for me, was to arrive in this tiny sea-side suburb of St Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire. In the early 1950s it was chosen by Jacque Tati as the location for his film Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. The film was very successful at the box office and for many film lovers remains endearingly funny in an old-fashioned French way. Tati chose St Marc because it was still like a pre-war seaside town where people used to take their congé annuelle.

Not any more.

Hotel de la Plage, which really existed back then, is now a Best Weston hotel with a separately run, and apparently not particularly good, restaurant. The latter would be true to the film, but not the prices.

The whole plage area is Hulot themed, though there is no one selling glace of any any kind, no ponies, no small boats,

just lots of under inspired Tati references.

The truly surprising thing for me was the quality of the actual sand on the beach, which must be the same as it was back then. It's gritty, course grained, dull coloured stuff that is too dry and kicks up as dust.

There are still guys playing on the beach, but it seems a dusty affair and I that's not in the film!

This themed stuff goes on a bit, though of course most of the area is dedicated to parking cars.

Right next to the sea the sand is damp enough to be nicely walkable.

And they cannot change the rocks.

We were parked some 2k outside St. Marc on the municipal aire de service et stationment. The latter was full so we were in fact pitched up as shown below right next to the service point. It didn't work, prolly because the municipality blasted it daily with a power hose hence knocking out the credit card reader. A lot of vans came and went during the day, and the night. The one next to us was broken down and had been abandoned by its company of 5.
We had travelled into St Mark on the U3 service to St Nazaire university. It's very expensive at 1.80 euro for two stops, but extremely fast for a bus and every 20 minutes. Of course it wasn't priced by distance but time.

The aire is on a cliff above the beautiful beach shown below, where the perfect fine-grained golden damp sand is kissed by the eternal ocean. It's deserted. Well it was 8 in the morning.