Day 4 |
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La Rochelle - Bilbao (July 7th)
Whenever you find a place to sleep in the dark, it's always interesting to
wake up the next morning and see where you ended up crashing.
In this case
we woke up in a parking lot, lying by a fence, surrounded by mobile homes
out of which stumbled bleary-eyed parents who gave us strange looks. There
you have two extremes of travelling: bringing your whole house with you as
opposed to travelling with a minimum of things.
NB
It's like Chris said (digustedly), "C'est un genre d'escargot"
After eating breakfast, which arrived in an old 2CV in the form of bread and
croissants, we hit the road continuing our journey south. The worst time of
the day is just after lunch at around 2 pm when the sun just beats down on
you. We soaked our shirts with water as often as we could but predictably
they were dry again after only 10 minutes of riding. After a nice siesta
under a palm tree near a gas station, we stopped in Bordeaux for an expresso
and to write some postcards. By the way, don't trust overly friendly French
waiters who tell you that they'll mail your postcards for you.
I think none of the half dozen postcards we wrote made it to their destination.
In Bayonne, we got on the highway to ensure that we arrived in Bilbao in
good time. The highways in Spain are as if not more expensive than they are
in France, and actually I believe that this particular one is the most
expensive one in Spain, but the stretch between San Sebastian and Bilbao is
just amazing. Winding through the hills of the Basque country, the smooth,
banked, predictable highway allows for steady 140 km/h cruising that is just
breathtaking. It was the first, but not the last, of the many great sets of
twisties we hit on the trip.
Roads: The N137 goes all the way to Bordeaux. Afterwards, the N10, which
is a 2-lane highway at times, goes to Bayonne. The A63 goes to the spanish
border and links up with the A8 on the spanish side, which goes to Bilbao.
Day 3 
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