CYBERCENTRES
IN THE VENDÉE
Sad though
it is, sometimes on holiday
you just have to keep up with the real world...
you just have to keep up with the real world...
If you do not have access to a telephone line in your gite, caravan or campsite there are more and more cybercentres in the Vendée where you should be able to pick up mail, do a spot of websurfing and so on. (Some of the top-grade, four-star offer these facilities to its clients, too - worth checking before you go off looking for somewhere else.) It usually costs 1 or 1.5 euro just to pick up a few emails.
There is a list here of NetPublic locations - places where you can find public internet access. Click on "Pays de la Loire" on the map, and then choose Vendee.
Before you take off on holiday, make sure you know whether your UK internet service provider has a “webmail” facility (so you can collect your mail from another dial-up connection). Otherwise you could set up a Hotmail account and arrange, before leaving home, to forward all your mail to that so that you can pick it up easily.
There are wi-fi facilties in many places, but if you are going to set up your own connection via your laptop, you will need also to find out the international dial-up number for your ISP. (The one you use back home will not work from abroad.)
Ask at the tourist office nearest to you for the address of a cybercentre (pronounced "see-bare-song-tr"). The centres are used to tourists dropping in, so you should have no problem (except with the wretched French AZERTY keyboards, that ensure you will have a liberal sprinkling of mistypes, since many letters and punctuationmarks are in different positions!) You will probably pay around 1 euro (inimum charge) per hour.
TIP When you want to type a full point, it is easier to use the one on the number keyboard, to the right, than to work out how to get it with Shift and other keys on the main part of the keyboard.
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A good one for those in the Apremont area is in the village of Maché, midway between Challans and La Roche-sur-Yon:
Maché Cybercentre,
10 Rue du Calvaire (opposite the Mairie)
Maché
Open Mon-Sat 3-6pm (closed on public holidays)
Not only can you use your wi-fi enabled laptop here, but the organisers supply an extension with UK sockets, in case you want to charge up while you surf and have forgotten an adapter!
Here is another, in Challans itself:
Challans Cybercentre
Espace Diderot,
Boulevard Rene Bazin,
Challans
(tel: 02 51 68 89 37)
For other places, see the NetPublic site mentioned above.