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Saturday is parkrun day
A fairly normal way for us to spend a Saturday morning is by doing a parkrun. In general terms, France is a bit desolate on that front, however Bordeaux is one of the few places that has one nearby. The one in question is Les Dougnes – it’s a sparsely attended event of three laps around some open grassland beneath a bunch of powerlines. On this day they had 49 finishers, which I think they said was a new record for them. With the exception of Kas, we all found it quite hard going. Izzy hasn’t done parkrun in ages. Me and Ami really aren’t fit enough to run quickly in heat like that. But it was a nice distraction before we had to head for the hills, though.
The parkrun site didn’t have a cafe so we headed straight off in the direction of the nearest motorway, with the promise of some motorway cafe style pastries and coffee. We found a place just north of Bordeaux which I hadn’t planned to stop at (because there was no geocache), however we needed a stop, and it proved to be the best decision of the day. We got coffee, pastries and cold drinks and sat inside in the services in our smelly running kit. Well, Ami got changed, the rest of us didn’t.
Slowly Does It
So back in the car, we immediately discovered why the sat nav had estimated an hour for the 60 km from parkrun to my first planned caching stop. The motorways around the outskirts of Bordeaux were absolutely solid with traffic in both directions. It took flippin’ ages. So much so, that we decided to skip the planned caching stop in Gironde and head straight off for the next one.
The next stop was in the department of Landes. We reached it by driving down the most empty motorway ever. The A65 runs 150km from Langon in Gironde down to Pau. Our chosen stopping point was the services at Aire-sur-l’Adour. This was nice enough and an easy place to find a cache. However we must make a point of realising that the French always stop for lunch between 12:30 and 2pm. If you go to a service station that has a restaurant during those times on a summer Saturday you are going to find a lot of people. On the third lap of the car park we got lucky and found a space. We didn’t want a lot of lunch, as we’d had breakfast a couple of hours previously. It was nice to get cold drinks and some crisps and sit out on the grass though.
C’mon you ‘Gers
Aire-sur-l’Adour is on the eastern edge of Landes, close to the border with Gers, so it seemed a waste not to drive 5km over the border and grab a single cache there. I chose one in Barcelonne-du-Gers that is sited at an old prison. It was a lovely spot. We got to look a little more closely at it than we might have liked. OK, so I couldn’t find the cache. Kas found it eventually, in a place I’d apparently discounted 10 minutes earlier.
Moving swiftly onwards, we finished off the A65 and switched to the A64, heading east in the direction of Tarbes. We made a quick stop for a cache at a no-service rest area in Pyrénées-Atlantiques and then when we got off the motorway at Tarbes we were in Hautes-Pyrénées I’d planned another stop. That was a quick dash from a rather dodgy pull-off at the roadside.
That was enough caching for the day, having coloured in another 4 departments.
Really! Time to head for the hills now
The route from Tarbes took us down through the town of Lourdes and from there we headed up into the mountains towards our final destination for the day, Luz-Saint-Sauveur. We stopped in Lourdes to fill the car up with holy water, which proved slow and painful but it was, at least, fairly cheap. That tank full should hopefully last until we come down out of the mountains again.
We’d booked an oversized apartment containing three bedrooms, which during skiing season is supposed to sleep eight people. Technically there is sleeping for eight, and there’s both a bath and a shower, however two of the sleeping berths are in the lounge, and there’s only one toilet between eight. Four feels like a better occupancy rate, even though it costs a lot more.
We wandered up into the town and grabbed a load of drinks and stuff for breakfast (and ice cream) and then we all got cleaned up and went out for dinner. We wanted pasta but could only find space at a pizza place. Fair enough.
That had been another fairly long day.