Day 35 - Capbreton to St Jean de Luz - Gorging in France ...Then Basquing in the Pyrenees - 2023

May 22, 2023

Day 35 - Capbreton to St Jean de Luz

Au Revoir Mon Ami

We’re now half way through this adventure and tonight will be our last night in France. It’s hard to remember all of the new and, there’s no other way to describe it - simply amazing - countryside that we’ve ridden through. Although writing up this journal on a daily-ish basis is a chore, without it we’d certainly forget a lot of what we’ve done and seen, and that would be a shame.

We started the day with a very good breakfast at the low key but friendly Hotel de Cap. The regular French breakfast stuff, excellent fresh flaky croissants, yogurt, cereals, cheese and charcuterie plus a great selection of fresh fruit. The oranges have been fantastic of late, a good omen for Spain, and today there were also perfectly ripe and juicy passion friut!

We set off south from Capbreton along the EV1 route. The weather was ideal, sunny with a few clouds in the sky, temperature in the mid teens and rising, with a nice cool sea breeze blowing off the water … as a light side wind!

We had more of our ‘Hotel California’ experience south of Capbreton … pine trees, the land getting progressively more sandy, large houses by the sea and lots of golf courses.

We took a little diversion to ride to the beach at Ondres and it was lovely. Almost deserted on a Monday morning and a long fine sand beach stretching off in both directions with waves cresting and rolling onto it. Looking at all the ‘tourist infrastructure’ around though, it will not be so calm and peaceful in the coming weeks.

The nice easy more or less flat cycling continued on to Bayonne, which was surprisingly industrial. It’s a real working port with all of the associated transportation and storage infrastructure. Interesting but not particularly pleasant. After Bayonne the landscape and cycling changed quite a bit. From here to Biarritz, we were in built up commercial / residential areas the entire time, and the headlands and first hilly features of the Pyrennes started to appear.

Biarritz was quite dramatic, and obviously a very established beach resort area. Great if you’re into that sort of thing but not really our cup of tea. From Biarritz south to St Jean de Luz, there was a real feel that we were in a different country.

The signs were now in Basque and French, the countryside and seashore were green rolling hills and headlands and everything was taking on a more dramatic flavour.

There were also campgrounds everywhere … and I mean everywhere! The weather over the last few days had been better than the forecasts, and although the current forecast called for clouds to develop, the chances of rain were very low. With that we decided to break out Agnes one last time in France and pulled into one of the very nice campgrounds that surround St Jean de Luz in the early afternoon.

The campground was a couple of km’s south of St Jean and since it had a decent restaurant at it, we decided to keep things simple tonight and eat there. Good basic Basque fare, we split a calamari and then each had a bowl of linguine, mine with a traditional basque veal ragu and K with mushrooms, Serrano ham and Marsala .

With that we had an early night and crawled into the tent for what we thought was going to be a peaceful night.

At 1 am, yes 1 am, a road crew started about 100 m away from us with quite heavy machinery, the sort that beeps loudly every time it’s in reverse, which was every 30 seconds or so. This continued until 3 am. Unbelievable!

To add to this, when were were woken up by the construction noise, K discovered that her mattress was flat. We pumped it back up, but a few minutes latter it was flat again. I then knew what I was going to be doing at 6 am when it got light out … find the leak and fix it.

Our mats are Exped UL7’s that are 11 years old and have had a lot of use. We’ve had a few leaks over those years and they’ve been easy to fix and overall very reliable and comfortable. One clarification though, only one of our mats is 11 years old, the other one is new as of this summer. The other 11 year old mat had a failure of one of the internal seams that separate the 6 lengthwise baffles that make up the mat. This seam failure caused two of the baffles to become one bigger one, and although the mat still held all the air, it was more or less unusable. That’s why we bought ‘one’ replacement. It should have been a clue that at 11 years old, maybe both mats had seams that were on their last legs.

Once the sun was up I went off to the sanitary building where the washing sinks and counters are … good to be able to check for leaks in a big sink. I didn’t need the sink at all as the problem was very clear. The end seam on the mat had failed. It was just a small separation but you could see that the glued seam was coming apart for about a 2 cm length. I managed to fix it, although the repair kit and instructions are not really intended for this type of failure. We’ll have to see how this hold up for the rest of the trip …. Or we’ll be buying a replacement mattress when we can find one.

Suffice to day, our final night of camping in France was not the best!

C’est la vie.

Heart

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SOTD - I Can’t stand The Rain by Tina Turner

I’ve been plugging away at this post, and the next day, for a couple of days now. We’re lying in bed in San Sebastián and I’m just about to ask Kirsten what she thought about this day, is there a particular word or phrase that sums it up? It’s something we do to agree on a SOTD when there isn’t an obvious candidate.

We’ve got music playing in the background on the Boom, just our ‘Favourites’ playlist on random shuffle. This song happens to be playing. Just as I’m about to pop the SOTD question to Kirsten, who’s been catching up on the news as I’m blogging away, says ‘Tina Turner just died’.

So sad to hear this. She was such a legendary performer who rose above so much adversity in her life. Is it merely coincidence, fate, karma that this happened? Who knows, but it gets SOTD.

Leaving Capbreton on another beautiful morning. Very nice low key hotel right on the harbour.

Half way through the trip … better check our tire pressure. All four needed a bit of a top up.

Hey Bruce, if you’re reading along they’ve got your bike shops everywhere around here

Lovely flat biking as we head south towards Bayonne. The soil is getting quite sandy and we are catching glimpses of the large beaches a few hundred meters west of us.

We took a little excursion to check out the beach at Ondres. Beautiful almost deserted beach on a Monday morning.

This mother and her two young kids were our only company!

Into Bayonne, a large working port. Wes Anderson inspired photography here.

And then back into our Basque version of Hotel California as we approached Biarritz

In Biarritz riding along the rocky bluffs

Looking north to Biarritz and it’s lighthouse

Beach on the south end of Biarritz. The main town and beach are on the north side of the outcrop to the north

In Biarritz looking south to St Jean de Luz

We followed the Eurovelo 1 today … also one of the main routes for the many pilgrims making their trek to Santiago .

Approaching St Jean de Luz. Very spectacular coastline and harbour … with suitably spectacular houses perched on the bluffs

Spotted two other touring bikes … both with Rohloff’s and belt drives .. one Koga and this very nice Titanium Van Nicholas (both Dutch brands)

…owned and ridden by this Spanish couple who were having a nice lunch break. They are on their way to Nantes in France

Coming into the nicely protected harbour in St Jean de Luz

Breakwater at the entrance to St Jean de Luz

Rocky shore north of St Jean de Luz. Definitely getting into the hills of the Pyrenees and we’re within a km of Spain

Agnes out of the bag and set up for another night. Very nice campground, one of about 20, surrounding St Jean de Luz

Simple and tasty dinner at the campground restaurant … shared calamari to start - basque flavours, very good.

And our pasta’s, simple , tasty, filling. All good!

Good night, and goodbye to France. It has been a wonderful time of discovery for us!

Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,549 km (962 miles)

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Rachael AndersonIsn’t that a beautiful area!
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11 months ago

Kirsten KaarsooTo Rachael AndersonIt sure is. It would have been nice with a bit more sunshine but the weather is what it is.
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11 months ago