You really don’t know what to expect when you board a train to a French beach in November—just pack a little hope and skip the swimsuit, because November on the Atlantic coast can be rainy, gloomy, grey, and depressing.

I picked November 11 for this unlikely trip because there’s nothing else to do on l’Armistice, known as Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, so I figured I might as well walk along a presumably empty stretch of sand and breathe the salty air.

I settled on posh La Baule, the closest beach town to Nantes. This is where well-off families gather all summer long, but rich people keep a strict holiday schedule and tend to close their expensive properties for the winter—the slopes await in ski resorts across the country.

Who’s left in La Baule in November? Surely not many.

Except on this November 11.

The weather turned out milder and warmer than expected. That was the first pleasant surprise.

The second was the gorgeous scenery: shades of shimmery metallic grey, the sky reflecting in puddles left by the receding tide, and vivid splashes of colour dotting the sand—people’s jackets and the many wings from wingfoilers. Apparently wingfoiling is quite popular in La Baule in November. Go figure. I don’t understand rich people.

I walked the three- or four-kilometre stretch of sand to Le Pouliguen, the next town, where we usually go swimming in the summer, and then walked back to La Baule.

So much for my empty beach and my face-to-face afternoon with Mother Nature—I spent my time people-watching instead. It was actually an entertaining and unlikely mix of wingfoil experts, older couples walking their dogs (I bet they thought the beach would be empty too!), and the ever-present La Baule snobs. A three-piece suit on the beach—really?

According to the locals, it’s never that warm, that busy, or that lovely in November. Lucky me.