Plage de la Capte

So here is the post I promised this morning on our day trip to Plage de la Capte, a beach community not far from Hyeres on the Mediterranean. When we set out to the bus station for the ride to the beach, we were crossing our fingers that it wouldn't rain on us, as the until-today perfectly blue Cote d'Azur sky had clouded over and looked a menacing gray. But our luck held, and the sun appeared as our bus meandered out of Hyeres and toward the coast.

I think it's safe to say we all had a fabulous time. We arrived a little after noon, strolled through a huge open-air market set up along the beach, and stopped at a little patisserie, where I bought (for the bargain price of two euros) a baked meringue the size of a normal loaf of bread. I've seen these meringues everywhere here, and it seemed necessary to sample the local treat. (As it turned out, the meringue was not at all unlike the pointy-topped meringue cookies I've been known to eat by the bucket from Trader Joe's--which is to say, the French meringue was good enough to devour, but not mind blowing.)

We then trekked out to the beach, found a quiet spot on the very warm sand, shrugged off all of our junk (we're traveling as lightly as possible here in Europe, but traveling with two children under 5 is never truly "light" -- we had a backpack, a diaper bag, a stroller, a beach mat, a beach bag, and a snorkeling mask), and immediately dipped our toes into the water of the Mediterranean. The water was less than warm, but certainly not unpleasantly cold. Finn and I actually swam, in fact (though by the end of our visit to the beach we had to pull him from the water because his teeth were chattering and his body trembling with shivers). I was surprised to find that there weren't any shells on the beach, and not much seaweed. The water is incredible clear, blue-gray, and very, very salty.

We stayed a couple of hours, picnicking and swimming. Finn came away with a few more freckles, I think, and I came away with a rather wicked burn on my back, but otherwise it was a perfectly lovely day.

As an aside, we couldn't help but notice the other beach-goers, most of them French. They seemed to have perfected the art of simply lying in the sun (something I think I could never learn to do without feeling seriously restless), and most of them had the complexions to show it. I saw many folks whose skin resembled the color of a fresh-from-the-soil beet (that is, brown with a faint purple-red undertone). Or, perhaps, an eggplant? I'd call this color aubergine, and it seems to me unnatural as a skin tone, no matter one's race or ethnic heritage. These beach-goers had over-baked their skin. Nathan and I both came home wondering about the skin cancer rates in France, and whether or not there is less cultural pressure/awareness regarding this issue than in the U.S. (where, it seems, everyone carries around a bottle of SPF 50 in the summer months, and women in particular are made to fear the skin-ravaging effects of too much sun). Nathan looked up the data on this when we got home, and it seems that while there may be more cases of melanoma in the Mediterranean countries, there are fewer deaths from skin cancer. Dangerous melanomas, he read, are often the result of sporadic exposure to intense sunlight (you know, like our trip to the beach today), and as one might expect, people with slightly darker complexions to begin with (in other words, people from sunny regions like the Mediterranean) are not as prone to such cancers as those of us with northern European ancestry. I can certainly say that my Scandinavian skin would never--no matter how many afternoons I spent learning to lie in the sun on a beach--turn tan. My normally bisque complexion will always, always, always end a day in the sun looking more like lobster bisque. Alas.