2009 Entry 8 May 8 Lourdes

[David and Susan Bratt]

One night we watch the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean; the next, over the Pyrenees. Being retired is tough work.

From the dune we drove through miles of flat marshy land, through managed forests, to Bayonne, where we parked for the night in a beautiful free camperstop overlooking the ocean. There must have been fifty motorhomes there, but it was a quiet and peaceful place to stop for the night. We keep looking for other American motorhomes but so far haven’t seen any. We caught a bus for a brief tour of Bayonne--a lovely old colorful city--but mostly enjoyed the beach area.

The next day we drove to Pau (rhymes with “so”), where we found a huge centrally located parking lot that was also supposed to be a camperstop. We spent the afternoon exploring the city and a restored chateau which, for some reason, wasn’t charging admission for the day. This is the place where France’s King Henri IV was born, and it includes the huge tortoise shell that was supposed to have been his cradle. (Henri appears to hold a place in the approved versions of French history similar to George Washington’s in US history and Elizabeth I in English.)

We decided we didn’t like the idea of a busy city parking lot for an overnight stay and instead drove on to a tiny hillside campground outside of Lourdes with a distant view of the mountains. This is the first place that we have tripped a circuit breaker: we believe it’s because we had 3 amp service, which wasn’t enough when David tried to check the tire pressure with our new compressor, which draws 7 amps.

In the morning we drove into Lourdes, the pilgrimage destination of 5 million people a year. It wasn’t terribly crowded, but as usual it doesn’t take much traffic in the tiny streets to be daunting. We drove around looking for a place to park while ignoring the GPS’s attempts to send us down really tiny streets and finally found a gas station with a very helpful man. He gave us the right extension for his air machine to check our tire pressure, he helped us figure out which LP adaptor to use to fill the tank and how to attach it, and he told us where we could park. All of this without any English, an accomplishment on all our parts.

Lourdes is totally oriented toward pilgrims and tourists. In addition to the usual souvenirs, one can also purchase plastic water bottles in the shape of the Virgin Mary so you can bring home your own supply of holy water. (You can also buy two-litre bottles). Lourdes is one place where the church collects enough money to keep things in excellent condition. The main Basilica (which looks not unlike Disneyland’s palace, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful to anyone) is quite magnificent. There are at least a dozen 30 ft high and 20 ft wide mosaics of the life of Christ that are just stunning. Everything looks clean and new but is only 150 years old. We visited the obvious chapels and crypts but avoided the St Bernadette birthplace and various other shrines.

But the real delight of the day was the ride on a funicular railway to the top of the Pic Du Jer mountain on the edge of town, going 3000 meters which felt like straight up. The view from the top was spectacular, and there were very few clouds to mar the view. Since David doesn’t really want to get whole lot closer to the mountain roads, this was as good a view as we were going to get. We exhausted ourselves walking around and returned to Rover for a rest stop. We had planned to walk back the few blocks into the city center for the nightly procession, but a noisy group of gypsies in a panel truck with six dogs had pulled up next to us in our absence, so we decided to head to another campground just east of town. Having half a dozen different books about campgrounds and camperstops options pays off.

The weather has warmed. We took jackets to the top of the mountain but we really needed sunscreen. Clouds are moving in again and then move on. We are now camped in Toulouse after having traveled 116 miles on Thursday, plus grocery shopping. As much as we would like to shop in the outdoor markets and little shops, we find shopping in the big supermarkets much more convenient. The larger towns pretty much follow the same formula. There is a ring road circling the town (which helps us keep Rover out of centre ville) and at one of the traffic circles there will be some kind of superstore, kind of like a Walmart with food, a gas station, an ATM, a McDonalds (our internet life line) and a variety of other stores. We have come to count on this. We can safely park in the supermarket parking lot and walk wherever we need to go.

Today is a holiday, as we discovered while waiting for a bus, only to find that it was on the “Saturday and Holiday” schedule: in the US we call it “VE Day”; here, with a fine Gallic disregard for events in the Pacific, it commemorates “The End of the War.”