119.6km, 9hrs 24mins – 1570m total
climb
It was raining heavily all through the
night. The rain was bashing on the caravan roof. But when we got up
and it actually had stopped raining.
We were checking the weather forecast
in Eauze the night before and as we didn't feel extremely confident
that it wasn't going to rain again the next day, we tried to organise
a dry place beforehand and phoned the campsite in Orthez to arrange
another caravan stay. The only problem was that the guy from the
campsite didn't speak a word of English and a very difficult to
understand dialect of French and he didn't fully understand our
French attempts either.
We left it at that and set off in the
hope of getting a caravan without reservation or even better a
possible change of being able to camp if the weather was better in
Eauze.
The route was not much different to the
day before, the weather slightly better with only a few drizzles once
in while. We did notice, however, that there were a lot of signs for
flooding on the route and some roads were covered in thick layers of
sand where it had been washed out of fields by floods.
We cycled through some more French
villages all with a little (some with a not so little) church in the
middle. The style is very similar and we start to get a slight
feeling of “deja vu”. I wonder how the pilgrims must feel. We did
stop at a one of two nice examples anyway and took a picture for good
measure.
Greg also found two very cheap cars
that he would have bought on the spot if I didn't stop him. He did
take lots of pictures in case they were still on sale when we come
back. He says they are in very good condition, especially the 2002
could make a profitable classic.
20km before we got to Orthez we stopped
at a little cafe. We had run out of drinks on the bikes and decided
to have something there to keep us going, and buy some water. There
were a couple of pilgrims sitting outside and as we overheard them
taking we noticed that they were English. The first other than French
pilgrims (apart from the Australian guy) we have seen so far, the
others all seemed to be French. Anyway the cafe also sold bottles of
water, so we got one but we paid for our drinks at the end before we
left and as the bar maid had changed they forgot to charge us for the
bottle of water. We only noticed ourselves about half hour after we
had left. I felt bad and decided that in order to keep Karma happy we
will need to make a donation of 2.50 EUR somewhere.
We also seem to have found all twinned
French towns for the part of Bavaria I am from. Was strange to read
all these familiar names in an unfamiliar area.
We arrived at the campsite just outside
Orthez at about 5pm. The campsite looked open. We went to the
reception and found the same guy we tried to speak to on the phone
the night before. He was a big bearded guy and looked quite Spanish.
We have started to notice that people are starting to look different,
smaller with darker skin and darker hair. Anyway, the Spanish looking
guy at the campsite reception explained that the campsite was closed
due to flooding. Bugger! Unfortunate for us he didn't feel the need
of mentioning this on the phone the night before and we now had to
find alternative accommodation for the night.
We cycled to the nearest hotel on the
GPS (Kyriad Hotel) and they had a room but the deal went bad as the
woman at the reception turned out to be incredibly rude and then
arrogantly spoke French to her colleague in front of Greg (about us)
when he perfectly well understood what they were on about. We decided
that they didn't want our money, so turned our backs on them and
headed for the town centre of Orthez. We found one hotel but it
looked really rough and definitely closed, so we checked for other hotels in the area on
the GPS and cycled to one of the suggestions. We got there, it looked
nice, but the door was locked. We got slightly frustrated and went
for a drink in a bar around the corner and also to ask the bar man
for nearby hotels. He suggested the same hotel which was closed and
another one of which he wasn't sure if it was closed. We desperately
didn't want to go back to the Kyriad Hotel with the rude receptionist
and decided to try the one that was closed once again (there was a
phone number to ring on the door) before looking for the bar man's
second choice. As we rolled up to the hotel again, we noticed that
the bar next door belonged to the hotel and was open. A guy was
working on the sign above the door and we asked him if the hotel was
open. Turned out the guy was the owner and the hotel was open. He had
only locked the entrance door as he was working on the top level of
the hotel. We got a beautiful room. The hotel looked newly renovated,
all in French shabby chic. We later found out that it used to be 7
different houses which were originally divided by a narrow street and
two courtyard in between two main streets, but later all connected to
one building. Must have been a hell of a project.
It was an expensive stay (86EUR) but we
felt that we deserved a little treat. We also treated ourselves to a
little glass of red wine in the bar, 4EUR for 2 glasses (inclusive
peanuts for free). The wine is getting cheaper!
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