Nienke on Eurotrip, part 2
With the kind permission of Nienke i am now posting one of her blogs of her trip through europe here..
Story by Nienke van Breugel Pics are from the Internet (if any photog has © problems, let us know!)
This summer I really wanted to go to the skimboard contests in Santa Cruz (Portugal) and Hossegor (France), so I asked quite a few of my friends to come along… “I have to work”, “I don’t like camping”, and “I haven’t got enough money” were the most heard responses. So I decided to go anyway, allone.
On Saturday night the 25th of July I left by car to go to my first destination, Cap Ferret. I stayed there for 3 nights, had some nice skim, not very big and a lot of tourists in the water, but still nice.
After those 3 days, on Wednesday the 29th of July (my birthday!) I went to Bordeaux to pick up Manick who accompanied me to Santa Cruz. We started our journey with a traffic jam and it took us 13 hours to get to Santa Cruz. When we arrived at 10pm it came out to be nigh impossible to find the campsite, especially when a security guy from the festival sends you the wrong way. After another hour we finally found the campsite and we were able to put up our tents.
The event was great, I had a few good sessions, met a lot of skimboarders and saw a lot of incredibly good skimboarding. I also participated in the competition. There were 10 girls and I ended up 5th, and Manick managed to win the contest! I think I could have ended up higher if I didn’t screw up my 2nd heat. On the last night there were 2 very nice concerts, so we celebrated Manick’s victory with a lot of caipirinha’s and good music!
On Monday the 3rd of August, Manick and I went to Esmoriz for 2 nights. I think the waves overthere were the best waves during my whole skimtrip! Unfortunately we weren’t able to skim those waves because of the massive amount of tourists in the water… 
Anyway, we still had some pretty good sessions in the evenings, and it was there that I ate the best hotdog I’ve ever had in my life.
On Wednesday the 5th of August we had to get back to Hossegor. After I had brought Manick to the trainstation in Bayonne, I went to Hossegor to find a campsite. And if you think you can find a free place on campsite in Hossegor in August… think again… After checking 5 campsites which came out to be full, I went to the tourist office. They told me that ALL the campsites in a 25km radius around Hossegor were full (we’re talking about more than 25 campsites here!) They gave me directions to a campsite which had some places left, a 40 minutes drive from the beach. It was a very nice small campsite, too bad it had to be so far from the beach.
It was nice to meet all the other skimboarders again from the UK, Portugal, Spain and ofcourse France. The event in Hossegor was well organised, but the weather screwed it up. I participated in the girls contest, but there was so much wind, we might as well have done some ‘rock paper scissors’ to determine the winner. I ended up 3rd.
After the event in Hossegor I decided to a bit further up north. Just before I arrived at Nantes, my mother sent me a textmessage that she and Paul were staying at a campsite near Nantes, so I payed them a visit. We played a lot of ‘Rummikub’, to great boredom of Paul
After one nigt I moved on to visit Romain at Pornichet and to skim La Courance. Allthough Romain had to work during the day, he was so kind to let me stay at his appartement so I could skim at La Courance during the day, and during the evenings we went to some kind of a wine bar, and we went to a restaurant to eat mussels.
My last stop of this skimtrip was in Oostende, where Richard was spending his holidays with his family. Here we were able to make some last minute preparations for the Dutch Skimfest one week later, and we also had a little bit of skim.
3 Weeks and 5000 kilometers later I got back home, with the intention to go again next year!
This is a video from the event in Hossegor, by Oliver:
