Weather the weather

St Louis
Yesterday's weather: Getting better, much better

I'm sitting here this morning watching the sun pop its head over the hillside. It looks like it will be a beautiful day at last, but I don't suppose the weather will stay with us for long. It's very sad that most of the holidaymakers will be going home this weekend having had the worst holiday weather they can remember. Many, especially campers, gave up days ago, fed up with wet tents, muddy shoes and miserable kids who couldn't go in the pool.

Many years ago when we were holidaying in Frejus we had mixed weather, which was only to be expected at the very beginning of June. It was lovely and warm though and even though it was overcast we thought it would be nice to swim, especially as the pool was fairly empty. We gathered up children, towels and water wings and trekked off to the pool. As we arrived it started to rain, which didn't bother us , but the lifeguard said to us 'Oh no, you can't swim now, we are going to close the pool because of the rain'. I never could understand the reasoning, after all we were going to get wet anyway. I suppose he just didn't want to have to hang around in the rain himself, even though he had a nice dry hut to sit in!

On another occasion we were running low on fuel in the car and needed to fill up to get ourselves back to our campsite. It was raining and we had heard one clap of thunder. We pulled in at a garage in a small village in the Dordogne where we were told that they had shut the pumps off because of the storm. We never did get to understand that one. The garage patron took pity on us though and turned them on again just for us. Mad English people that we were, fancy wanting to fill up with petrol in a thunderstorm. How strange.