Today, we are at a beautiful Airbnb with The. Worst. Internet. (Basically, non-existant.) So no pictures again for a while. Check back again later.
As the crow flies, and as the optimistic mind roves, today was meant to be an easy day—a mere 30 kilometres, the long way around, down to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Our legs will tell a different story.
The first 8 kilometres out of Bayonne, along the Adour River, were easy enough, though not particularly picturesque, as is so often the case when leaving a city. Reaching the mouth of the Ardour, we hung a left and headed south down the coast—which is when things started to go sideways... or should I say, vertical.
We stopped at almost the first beach we came to, and Sonia went down to the water while I watched the bikes and had a double espresso. Turns out that the waves were a little too violent for her to get right in, so after a spell (we had done about 8km by this point), we got back on our way. Which is when the up and down really started. The next big destination was Biarritz and from there, the views were basically as breathtaking as the climbs. Just constant up and down—much of it quite doable, but some of it pretty tough. All of it totally worth it for the views. It was hard to keep your eyes on the road sometimes.
We had lunch at a lovely little park overlooking the Grand Plage at Biarritz and then pushed on. We stopped again for coffee and pastries at a perfectly placed patisserie at Bidart, and then we reached Guéthary and knew we only had 6 kilometres left... oof. It took us 45 minutes to cover those 6 kilometres.
Sonia handled the hills really well, and only had to push her bike up two of them (the latter of which was a truly brutal rutted gravel path with probably an 18% grade that even I had trouble pushing my bike up. The Vélodyssée really can be quite an adventure at times.
We arrived at the Airbnb at 3 pm on the dot and waited for our host to open it up. There is a lovely beach just a 5 minute walk down, and Saint-Jean-de-Luz is a 15 minute walk down the road. We have a lovely view, a comfortable bed, and, alas, terrible internet, which seems to be a theme on this trip.
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