Escaping the Heat in La Baule – Bourgeois Beaches and a Very Confusing Train

The girl sitting across from us with her friend was another Juliette. I flinched when her friend called her name just as the train left the station.

I glanced at my mum. She had heard it too, and she shrugged. “Sorry,” she whispered jokingly. “It is a nice name.”

But the name was about the only thing we had in common.

She was much younger than me, for a start—sixteen, eighteen? It’s hard to tell with girls, but her guy friends were clearly teens, and what girl hangs out with younger guys for fun at that age, really?

They were going to her grandmother’s place in La Baule, yes, all of them. The grandmother was sitting a bit further away, like a chaperone. The other Juliette rode her own horses, played tennis and went to a private school. They had plans for the night: a fancy meal and a bar later—did the grandmother hear that part? Ah. I clearly remember being 18 and sharing a single sandwich with four friends because we were all happily broke, just like our parents.

Juliette was clearly living in another world—she could have said the same about me.

Mark missed all the sociological clues. He was eyeing the teen guys, clearly in awe, looking for new role models he’d never dare talk to.

Fifty minutes later, the train stopped in La Baule, where older clones of our fellow passengers were waiting on the platform for their grandchildren, children, nephews, nieces and, occasionally, friends.

The three stations—Pornichet, La Baule-les-Pins and La Baule-Escoublac—sit just a few minutes apart along the coast and are both a blessing and a curse for full-time and part-time residents. On the plus side, the train is an easy way to reach Nantes and Paris, where most of them have a main or secondary residence. On the downside, the plebs from Nantes can easily come for the day and invade these towns on hot summer days.

And boy, was it hot. I’m not complaining, but when it’s 43°C, I’d rather be at the beach than in Nantes, which is why we We made two day trips in a row to uber-posh La Baule.

Hot days can turn everyone into a sweaty mess. Not in La Baule. The bourgeois are still wearing jeans, suits and dresses—proper ones, not tropical patterns like those covering my Brazilian dress. “Nice dress,” a local guy told me as I left the train station. He took another glance at me, as if I were some kind of rare animal, and nodded approvingly. “I’ve never quite seen anything like this. It’s… colourful.”

You bet. The bourgeois dress like the French flag or Sicilian widows.

And you’d better get dressed when you leave the sand because the police are waiting on the seafront promenade, sternly pointing at signs explaining that “civilized” people don’t walk around in swimsuits or shirtless—and that the fine is €150.

Mark, my mum and I don’t even try to blend in.

We can’t.

We brought sandwiches; they brought staff.

We come armed with my beloved Le Monde tumbler full of homemade coffee because everything is so damn expensive in La Baule. Quelle horreur! A leftist-branded tumbler—and who drinks coffee except factory workers, really?

We hang out on the sand and eat sandwiches while the bourgeois have a proper lunch at their beachfront properties. They only go to the beach after an afternoon nap, hoping the rest of us have already left town.

This time, we also discovered that there are no water fountains in La Baule—and, really, they should be mandatory when it’s this hot and a bottle of water costs €3. I ended up “stealing” water from the poshest beachfront hotel. The front door was wide open, and there was a fancy stone fountain with a tap at the entrance, presumably for dogs. I sneaked in and filled our water bottles. Mark found that “their” water tasted the same as our regular poor people’s H₂O.

But the biggest mystery of those two days wasn’t the bourgeois—it was the train.

Trains don’t like very hot weather. Overhead wires have a tendency to, ahem, overheat and sag, so quite a few trains were cancelled. For a moment, we thought we’d be stuck in La Baule overnight. Not sure I couldn’t have sneaked into the posh hotel for something other than water.

On the second day, on our way from Nantes, the train had to slow down because of a nearby forest fire. “All good, we made it through!” the train driver announced proudly.

That night, we boarded the 19:51 train just as planned, having forgotten about the incident. The three of us sat down and started doing our own thing: Mark listened to Gorillaz, my mum signed a petition against police brutality and I checked my emails.

And thirty minutes later, I heard “La Baule-Escoublac.” I looked over at my mum, who had heard the same.

“How can we be in La Baule-Escoublac? We boarded the train at La Baule-Escoublac!”

“Where the hell did we go, then?”

“No idea. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Me neither. Mark! MARK! Take off your earbuds. Did you see where the train went?”

“Le Croisic.”

“But that’s after La Baule. It doesn’t make sense! We’re going the other way!”

I asked around. We had accidentally boarded an earlier train travelling all the way to the tip of the coast—a severely delayed service and the first train allowed through after the forest fire had blocked traffic for most of the day. After reaching Le Croisic, it was now heading back to Nantes. We were fine.

We had set out to escape the heat and somehow ended up taking an accidental evening tour of the Guérande Peninsula. We had boarded the wrong train going in the wrong direction, travelled farther away from Nantes and still arrived home… just an hour late.

A typical summer adventure.

Somewhere behind us, the other Juliette was probably already at her fancy dinner, unbothered and exactly on schedule.