Week 8 p2: Wet, but OK!

I heard it, but the knocking didn’t wake me.

It was only when Sarah pushed at me and said there was someone knocking that I sprung to life and removed the privacy screen on the back door of the camper. I saw only darkness and then was blinded by a flashlight. Someone’s trying to open our door, but it’s locked.

“Hurry! Hurry! Water everywhere! Hurry”, a French accent shouted.

“Nooo!”, he shouted again when I put the screen back, but I then heard the anguish in his voice and realised that we might be in the middle of something serious.

I hastily unlocked the doors and opened the sliding side door. In the light of the lantern I immediately saw that the car was about to be flooded. There was water everywhere and I shouted to Sarah, basically exactly what the French voice shouted to us only seconds before. Get out! We kicked into action, but first had to untie the awning and tarp from the car we added a couple of days earlier to shelter us from the heavy rain and hail. It took only a couple of minutes, but in that time we realised the water was still rising and was now starting to get into the car through the front doors. Even getting the front door open was now difficult and I couldn’t close it properly. Water now in the footwells. I shouted to the man that there was another camper one pitch further down on the other side of the hedgerow and he ran splashing off in that direction.

With great relief the car started, but I had to make a three point turn due to the way we were parked. I managed to turn the car. The car now spluttering forward and bumped through an unseen newly formed ditch next to our pitch. I got it to higher ground and I left it there and ran back to Sarah still at the pitch, now with water over her knees. A towel around her waist and holding up the awning. Some of our belongings floating in the water around her. The water was still rising with alarming speed, but we managed to get the rest of our stuff out of the putrid water.

We were extremely lucky. That was what we ultimately concluded and also the opinion of everyone else, including the man who woke us, Marc, the owner of the campsite. Although he meant “we” as everyone at the campsite. It could’ve been so much worse. Only one camper van got partly submerged (the one on the other side of the hedgerow), and we managed to get our van out before any serious damage. But most importantly, nobody was seriously injured or worse.

For the rest of the night we were kept up by circling helicopters and sirens. And the smell of gasoline and flood water. We learned later that those helicopters were keeping a very close eye on our campsite as it was right in the middle of the area most at risk. At one point a helicopter was lifting someone into the air just over the treetops from us. I could see it right there so close to us. Unreal. Like a scene out of a movie.

Around four AM the first news stories broke on the internet. The river La Brague sprung it’s banks near the town of Antibes where we were camping. Several people are missing or feared dead in the area and also from another campsite across the river from ours. Less than a thousand meters away. And the reality of the situation started sinking in. It was serious.

And yes, we were extremely lucky to come out of it unscathed. So easily it could’ve been very different. The campsite worst hit was one we looked at just a few days earlier as a prospective camping site. Nine hundred meters away the train station we got on the train to Nice a few short hours earlier, was the scene of tragedy. Four people drowned there in the night whilst trying to shelter from the hail. The French president visited the station later that day. It could’ve been us we thought. Had we not cancelled our plans to go out to Monte Carlo due to the rain, it could’ve been us seeking shelter when the golf ball sized hail started pelting down more or less around the time we would’ve been returning. Just before the river broke its bank.

Later in the morning with our stuff hanging out to dry we sat on a new pitch whilst listening to the wailing sea animals next door at Marineworld, we decided there is no value in thinking about what could’ve been. We have those people who suffered most in our minds and hearts and we are thankful to be the lucky ones this time. So VERY thankful.

It was close, but we were lucky. We got wet, but we’re okay.