Our first Week Working In Camping Le Moulin in Chef-Boutonne

After many months of travelling in the past two years and exploring amazing countries which the latest included; Greece (Rhodes, Crete, Peloponnese and mainland Greece), Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, then Sweden and Spain (Extremadura, Aragon) and bits of Portugal; we finally stopped to get our hands dirty working in a French campsite for the season, from Mid-March to the end of September 2016.

Camping Le Moulin, Chef-Boutonne (departement, Deux-Sevres) in the Poitou-Charentes.

A panoramic view of our new home and place of work for the next months!

Our first week of work at Camping Le Moulin just outside Chef-Boutonne in the Poitou-Charente has been spent weeding and cleaning the paved reception/entrance area of the campsite, plant beds, hard standing campervan/caravan pitches and the boulle/petanque site; relaying and resurfacing hard pitches; mowing the whole site on some exciting sit down mowers (as a sit down mower virgin, I must admit that I was sadly excited about learning to use this new tool!); strimming, picking up/clearing grass of- any branches and sticks, but also cleaning the toilets and showers, and greeting new people!

The boulle/petanque pitch "Before"...

The boulle/petanque pitch "After". Cleared of most of the weeds!

Clearing weeds with the digger on one of the hard standing pitches...

And relaying the surface of the pitch using a new tool, a "crusher".

Jamie on his new favourite gadget!

As he becomes adept in using the big sit down mower, Jamie's unstoppable!

And more weeding!

The tool shed is our "Mecca"; a treasure trove of wheel barrows, garden brushes, big and small cutters, rakes, shovels, gloves. Stuart, one half of the English couple who owns the campsite, has been spending time with us from day one, showing us the ropes and guiding us on how to use the equipment. Luckily for us, except from the odd showers, the weather has been on our side much of our first week! Although we have worn our fleeces in the mornings, we've quickly dropped them as the early Spring sunshine warmed us through most afternoons. Rain-free meant being able to leave our phone on the ground from time to time and listen to 6Music whilst weeding. 

Our pitch for the next two months before we move on another one during the high season.

The campsite has been fairly quiet with only a couple of campervans or caravans on average arriving per day and leaving the next. It's allowed us to ease ourselves into our new work gradually rather than being thrown into the deep end. Already, we've managed to meet and get to know a little some of the people who own a mobile home on-site; Gary, Emma, Tony, John and Lorraine are some of the holidayers who've been coming back year after year and say that Camping Le Moulin is quite a unique place. After only a week there, Jamie and I have already felt its community spirit, its tranquility too and the added factor that Stuart and Sara (the other half) are the kind of owners who will go the extra mile to help and make one's stay a great one. 

What a packed week, it has been! Our bodies do ache already, but it is all worth it. We definitely wouldn't swap it for a four-walled cubicle, chair and computer. We finished our week off with our free meal at the campsite restaurant, Les Canards. A succulent plateful Sunday roast and a warm gooey-spongey cake topped with custard - our tummies nicely full, it was all we needed after our hard labour.

Our awesome roast! (Yes, unfortunately we didn't take the picture quite early enough...!)

Let's see what next week brings!