Feb. 8-16 By Eric

We had nothing to eat for dinner so after unloading the bikes I rode into the center of town, near the beach, to the grocery store. Not much was happening in Mimizan Plage. No wonder. It was dark, rainy, windy, and cold. The grocery was a warm, colorful oasis and the only place I saw anyone else in the town. I took my time choosing the cheese, chips, ham, bread, etc.

I was going with the wind on the way back to our hotel so I absolutely flew. I must have been going at least 35 or 40 mph all the way back in the dark on the empty, wet, silent streets. It felt surreal. It also felt great to go fast.

Meanwhile, Joan had taken all the plastic garbage bag liners out of our panniers and had the panniers and her wet clothes hanging from the curtain rod to dry.

All night long we heard the wind blow the trees around in with huge gusts. We heard rain pounding on the roof. I kept believing that the storm would blow itself out.

It didn't. We decided to leave anyway. Partly because there wasn't anything to do in Mimizan Plage and partly because we had noticed a long bike trail on our map. It looked like it went most of the way to Vieux-Boucau where we planned to stay that night.

All of Joan's drying efforts had worked well but fifteen minutes after setting out, everything was wet again.

The bike trail ("Piste Cyclable" in French), was well marked in town. Once we got to the trail, the first kilometer was hell. We went straight into an awful wind and rain. I rode in front in a low gear just trudging away, burrowing a temporary hole into the hurricane. I looked straight down because the rain stung my face when I looked ahead. I tried not to calculate how long and miserable the ride would be.

But soon the bike path turned south and entered a tall pine forest. The trees shielded us well from the wind. The wind was hardly a factor for the rest of the day.

The bike trail was awesome. It was very narrow and wound around a little bit. Riding it was like the forest moon scene in Return of the Jedi. We hardly saw anyone else all morning.

That was actually the only problem with the bike trail. We never passed any place to sit down and have a coffee. Although I imagine in the high season some of the small towns the trail passes near would have places.

We rode into one of the beach towns, St. Girons-Plage. It was all very new looking. It had a handful of restaurants, all closed, and several new beach houses. The beach was gorgeous. Huge chaotic waves crashed on it.

We splurged for another great five course lunch in Vielle. We almost had to -- it was the only place we had seen all day that was open.

Vieux-Boucau was disappointment. It seemed like it was strictly a tourist/summer-home village. Half the store fronts were real estate agencies. We only found one hotel that was open and it was overpriced and not especially friendly.

We rode about 20km farther to Hossegor which was about the same except a lot bigger. Actual crowds walked on the sidewalks, which appealed to us after a day without people.

We got a non-descript hotel above a seafood restaurant. Many of the hotels we had stayed in had been connected to a restaurant and we had never eaten at the restaurant of any of them. No one had minded. In fact, most had told us where we could find a grocery. The woman at this place, however, did mildly pressure us to eat at her restaurant. We didn't.

When we looked out the window in the morning we saw lots of white. It was snowing hard and there was already about an inch on the parking lot. We debated but in the end decided to ride. Bayonne was only 25km away.

The weather changed literally ever ten minutes all day. By the time we finished packing the bikes the snow had stopped falling and had started melting. We rode just about 200 meters to the nearest bakery for coffee and a croissant. While we ate the sun actually came out. But when we finished and got back on our bikes the clouds were back. Two kilometers later, it was snowing again. By the time we reached Bayonne, we had experienced rain, hail and sunshine.

We got a great hotel in Bayonne, or actually Petit Bayonne, called Hotel Des Basques. We settled in. We closed one of the shutters and used the space between the window and the shutter as a refrigerator to keep our meats and cheeses cold. We could have stayed there a long time.

Actually, we did -- we partied for five days. We made friends with the hotel owner, a guy named Gerard. He spoke excellent English but we also spoke to him a lot in French for the practice. He had only owned the hotel for a little over a year. Before that he was some sort of analytical accountant, whatever that is.

Like almost all the hotels in France he offered breakfast but, as always, we declined. However, on Valentines day he brought us croissants and gave us coffee. He had made three trips to America and really loved it, especially the Grand Canyon. He loved Bayonne and Pays Basque (Basque country, ie. the Basque part of France) too.

For Valentine's day, he said he and his wife went to a restaurant out by the McDonald's. He said he likes burgers, but every now and then it's nice to have French food. He said his 16-year-old daughter goes to McDonald's almost every day.

Bayonne is a Basque cultural center according to our guide book. However, although we passed lots of bars and restaurants with Basque names and we sampled several Basque foods, we did not manage to get a strong feel for Basque culture while we were there. I did sense a lot of tension between the French and the Basques. Perhaps there's some below the surface but I didn't sense it.

Unemployment is a bit worse in Pays Basque than the rest of France. The beggars seemed older and more sincere than many of those in Bordeaux for instance. Perhaps that's partly why there lot's of people in the streets wearing Barets. And we even saw a communist party poster. It said, "To govern from the left it is necessary to listen -- the French communist party."

When we finally managed to leave Bayonne, on a cloudy but dry day, we had a magnificent ride down the coast. Starting just south of the Adour river in Bayonne, the coastline gets hilly. We were in the foothills of the Pyrenees creating a much more dramatic coastline.

We stopped in Biarritz for several hours over lunch. Biarritz has a great beach, an attractive lighthouse, and lots of dramatic pillars of rock standing in the water. The stately church (built in the medieval style but only 150 years old) just off the beach has a model of a 17th century tall ship hanging from the ceiling.

We would have stayed in Biarritz but Gerard said that St. Jean-de-Luz, 15km away, was even better so we continued down the coast, following backroads and an occasionally marked bike path.

We stopped for a snack where a pair of benches overlooked the sea from the top of a cliff. It seemed like an out of the way place but many people wandered by while we made our sausage and cheese sandwiches. An older couple sat at the other bench, silently enjoying the view. A middle-aged woman walked up from no where and walked around the benches. Finally she asked the older couple what this place was called. (Joan was eavesdropping. I couldn't understand enough French.) Then she paced around some more.
In a few minutes a car pulled up and a middle-aged man got out. He joined the middle-aged woman. The two of them enjoyed the view for a few seconds then drove off together. Joan believes they were lovers having an rendezvous.

It rained almost the entire time we were in St. Jean-de-Luz but we loved it anyway. It has a great little fishing port that is still used for fishing, as it has been for centuries.

We stayed at the Hotel de Paris. Ironically owned by a Basque man and his two sons. (In Bayonne, we had stayed at the Hotel de Basque, owned by our friend Gerard, born in Paris.) I enjoyed talking to them. I was feeling more comfortable speaking and hearing French.

We walked a lot along the big crescent beach. We did laundry. We spent way too much on two coffees and two beignets (even Paris wasn't as expensive). The grocery store had strange hours for a store named "8 to 8": 8:30am to 12:30pm then 3:30pm to 7:30pm.

Like the one in Biarritz, the church (St. Jean Baptiste) here also had a model ship hanging from the ceiling.

It was a short hilly ride to the Spanish border. We found a fairly well marked bike path so it was very quiet and pleasant, although we seemed to climb to the very top of every hill, never once going around one.

As usual, it was cloudy and periodically rainy. The cloudy, dreary, damp winter I feared seemed to have set in. At least it wasn't cold. We stopped a lot to adjust our clothes to suit the weather.

We spent our last Francs at the Cafe de Frontier, a smokey place full of regular customers who stared at us in our dripping wet rain coats when we walked in. A few minutes after we finished our coffee, we were in Spain without so much as having to slow down for a passport check.

Next: Spain Chapter 1 - How wrong first impressions can be

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