Cycle Tour 2022 – Days 11 & 12: Vers le pays Basques

The descent south down the Vélodyssée is lovely but, like the stretch down the Canal de Garonne, there's not a lot of variety—you're either riding through quite heavily managed pine forest, or you're riding through a dusty beach town that, depending on its size, may be lively and open for business or sleepy and mostly still boarded up for the winter. 

So I didn't really feel like writing another missive describing basically the same day. But as we ride south, we are decidedly heading toward Basque country, and in these latitudes, though it is early in tourist season, it is most definitely tourist season. There are more shops and cafés open, and the atmosphere is much livelier. 

While lovely, yesterday was much the same as the previous day. We rode through forests, stopped at a beach for lunch, stopped at what turned out to be a fantastic patisserie/boulangerie, and rolled into our digs for the night—a strange little guest house with shared bathrooms and kitchen. Not as as nice as our usual lodgings, but it was a roof over our heads for the evening. 

Today, we began to see some changes in landscape as we headed out of the coastal pine forest and into Basque country. But it was still very familiar country. We stopped for second breakfast at a roadside campsite, went to observe the beach and surfers at Plage du Penon, had lunch beside a river, negotiated a detour along a single-track forest path due to bridge repairs, and eventually rolled into Bayonne about 4 pm, a total of 60 kilometres that went by very quickly. 

One of the neat things about this part of our trip is that we keep bumping into the same groups of cycle tourists. As we were pedalling the ups and downs of the terrain around the Dune of Pilat a few days ago, we stopped and chatted (in our broken Spanish) with a Mexican couple who were riding from Paris to Madrid. Then yesterday, as we left Mimizan Plage, we encountered a pair of French women who were having tire troubles. We asked them if they were OK (they were) and chatted for a few minutes before moving on. Then later that day, as we were finishing up our lunch at Saint-Girons Plage, another couple, whom we had met at a grocery store in La Hume a few days previous, pulled up, and then shortly afterward, the two French women stopped as well. It was like a family reunion. We had another really lovely chat, exchanging stories and information about various trips, before moving on. Then a few hours later, we all happened to stop at the same grocery store in Léon at around the same time. More conversation and even some sharing of chocolate. It was a really lovely sense of camaraderie. Today, we ran into the Mexican couple again just before entering Bayonne. More conversation, though brief, because our Spanish is not great, but again, that sense of camaraderie. I really love this part of our trips. 

We checked into our hotel in Bayonne, overlooking the Nive River, went for a swim in the hotel pool, showered and went out to explore the town. This far south, the cities escaped the bombing of WWII, and Bayonne has retained much of its 17th-century charm; it's clearly a bustling, vibrant place. We had a nice dinner at a bistro alongside the Nive and wandered some more, the two tired (but content) cyclists heading generally back to the hotel just as the town was coming to life on this Friday night.