What a few days we have had!

We left San Sebastian on Saturday morning on route back to France as we’d heard some very dodgy things about the road around Barcelona. The decision has been made to complete Spain, Portugal and Morocco on our next trip to Europe and dedicate more time to them to experience them on the same level as we’re seeing much of the rest of Europe. Although we can understand people focussing on specific tourist areas and completely understand how hard it is to get time away from work etc travelling in the way we have been has opened our eyes to what you see when you dedicate more time to the lesser known areas and really get in touch with local people. One of the best examples of this has been the France Passion subscription that we’ve been using. This has really allowed us to see how locals live, especially when we’ve stayed on farms where people live and make their living. Anyway, back to it...

We stopped on Saturday afternoon at Lourdes which is a pilgrimage town for Catholics due to miracles taking place in the town dating back hundreds of years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lourdes). We were lucky enough to witness a procession of what had to be about 5000 pilgrims, hundreds of which were in wheel chairs and hospital beds. To see these pilgrims arrive to the place that they’ve travelled so far to see, and hold so much faith in was a beautiful thing. It truly was an amazing experience and something neither of us will ever forget. When we got back to the camp site we spoke to an Aussie guy who said that we were really close to the Tour De France and showed us a great spot on the map to see the race! Brilliant!

Sunday morning we headed off to find our camping spot for the night on the side of the mountain. After a few stops to help Callum get his breath back, and a few stalls we found a brilliant spot 10km into the 19km climb of Mt Mee (which is one of the climbs of the tour that is too hard to rate). Due to a slight angle that we’d parked on, the fridge stopped working so we used the stream behind our van to cool our beers which actually worked heaps better than the fridge anyway... We were joined by a couple of Aussie brothers from Perth who pulled up and had a couple of beers with us before Andrew and one of the lads, Matt attempted to ride some of the course on Goose and Gander (Jamie has finally named her bike, I wanted her to call it Maverick!). The ride wasn’t terribly successful but certainly gave me more respect for these people that ride these mountains. I can also now say that I’ve ridden the Pyrenees. Monday morning we woke to the sound of more spectators arriving and amateur riders making their way up the course. We saw some brilliant efforts by people riding the mountain including an old bloke struggling up the hill with a young guy beside him pushing him in the back to assist which was just brilliant. Getting closer to the race coming through, there were about 20 floats that passed throwing out shirts, food, bags, hats and other useless things that will no doubt clog up the van, but we obviously needed to get to prove we attended. When the race finally arrived, the excitement and atmosphere was at fever pitch. The riders were yelling to each other but they were drowned out by people screaming for their teams and the sound of helicopters. Andrew, Matt and Dan managed to run with the riders for about 80 metres before they pulled away, to keep up the speed the bikes were doing after they’d already done 150KMs that day was super human! It was really a stroke of luck that we got to see the race but is another one of the biggest highlights of the holiday so far!

A&J xoxo