Our little lottery ticket near the Somme Bay

The search for a little vacation get-away has been a stressfull one.  We cancelled our booked vacation to Kroatia because of the Covid situation. Kroatia was already early in July "orange" for our government so at higher risk.  I also didn't want to cross 4 border crossings and drive 14 hours in a situation that was always changing.  When seeing the horror images of the border chaos in Austria previous Saturday - a monster traffic jam is one of my biggest nightmares! - I think we made the right decision. 

But where to go with the worsening situation everywhere?  When to book if cancellation policies hardly take into account the Covid regulations between countries etc?  We decided to wait last minute but had made the mistake to search beforehand a couple of times, only to notice that in the 2nd week of August all options we'd seen disappeared.  Everything was booked full.  Or it was awefull.   Or it was in orange area. 

The weekend before our vacation would start, I think we've checked all bungalow vacation parks in France, Netherlands and Germany. I checked thousands of pictures online, checked streetview and Google Maps etc.  It gave me a headache.  On Sunday we tried to book something in Côte d'Opale in France, but were just too late to book the last little bungalow.  On Monday evening we found a gorgeous ground floor appartment near the beach on airb&b. We booked and showed it to the children.  I had tried to avoid appartments or hotels where we had to share facilities with other people but the risk was minimized since we had ground floor access even with a tiny garden in front.  I started looking up nearby restaurants etc...
And then we didn't get any formal confirmation and when we phoned the next day we heard that the apartment was taken just before us (it was on multiple sites).  I was so disappointed and frustrated!! I literally got tears in my eyes. We threw hands up in the air and cursed a bit and decided to give up searching once again.  

But Jan persevered and while I tried to concentrate on my meetings (with more or less success) he continued the search.  A few hours later while I was in a video call, he was waving his computer screen to me from a distance behind my back with a questioning face. I quickly glanced at the pictures and nodded silently that they seemed fine (not knowing what, where, how).  When my meeting was over, he had already forwarded me the booking confirmation. Turns out it was also half the price of what we had recently been looking at. Winner!

Turns out he had stumbled on a little vacation house near the Somme Bay that had become available again after a last minute cancellation, and we have booked it within the hour online.  It was a recently renovated and well-equipped modern little house (the owners live in it part of the year!) with a nice spacious garden, at 15 min walk from the dunes and the beach behind and only a few kms from the Bay. 

And so we drove off mid August the full 3 hours to the French northern coast to install us in our little get-away for us.  We were greeted by the nice owners with a tray full of fresh tomatoes from the garden with the request to continue to take care of the tomato plants and eat as much a we'd like.  Jan got the introduction to the available BBQ equipment while the children discovered the hammock in the garden.  We got access to bikes, petanque games, laundry machines, binoculars to search for seals etc... Yep it was clear right away that we had found our little winning lottery ticket after scrolling the internet for days.  

PS:  the changing covid situation also brings opportunities so never give up: during our stay all of a sudden all the British had to go in quarentaine if returning from France/Spain/Netherlands so they all left early of cancelled their bookings which enabled new last minute opportunities to book.