Today the temperature is in the 20s again – another beautiful november day, so what better than to go out cycling and make the most of this weather before it becomes properly november-like. It certainly doesn’t seem to nearing the end of the year when the sky is a gorgeous clear blue with not a cloud to be seen.
The Pyrénées Mountains behind a house near 'Hôpital St Blaise'
On this 40km trip, I cycled through nearby ‘Hôpital St Blaise’, Gurs and Dognen. In Dognen, by the church, there is a relatively new resident called ‘Gribouille’, a noisy porker who doesn’t hesitate to come over when someone’s taking his photo.
My name's Gribouille and I'm as happy as a pig in shit...
It has been raining here for what seems like days, almost constantly. Consequently, the Gave d’Oloron, our nearby river has swollen massively and is in the process of flooding everything if the rain doesn’t stop soon.
This is the normally picturesque 13th century bridge
The Rafting centre is literally half underwater and several islands in the river have now been totally immersed. It remains to be seen whether the river gets any higher over the next few days as rain is forecast again until tuesday at least.
While my brother was over we decided to go for a bit of a cycle ride. I was trying to get him to come on our next cycle trip in September 2012. I’d just completed a ride from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean. You can read all about it here. As Peter’s not a regular cyclist at the moment, we went on a leisurely 30km ride around some local beauty spots, Peter snapping away with his camera like a regular Japanese tourist.
Aren - a local fishing spot
So he’s got plenty of great photos of the area which I can hopefully ‘borrow’ for this blog.
Yesterday, my fello ‘Wheezing Geezer’ Barry, and I went out for a bit of training and went a bit further than we meant to. The trip ended up being very hilly and quite long.
After this very steep hill, at least you could gaze over the vineyards of Jurancon at Monein
Then, today we had a group of accountants booked in to do some cycling in a lovely Basque village called Menditte.
This is good for team building apparently
There were ten teams of three out to race each other on an off-road circuit as part of a team-building excercise.
They’d picked a glorious day for it which was just as well, as from Menditte they were off north somewhere for a run then some walking. Maybe after that, some speed adding-up or something?
Our Jack Russell terrier Olive loves to swim in the nearby ‘Gave d’Oloron’ no matter what the temperature is. Luckily today it’s about 25 degrees, so we went for a walk down to the river beach at Méritein and I took our new underwater (well, water resistant) camera. I’ve been dying to try it out for weeks, so here was a great opportunity to see the results.
Doggy paddle!
It’s very difficult trying to point the camera in the right direction and there’s a long delay between pressing the button and the shutter going off.
Mine!
I ended up taking dozens of photos and only a few were interesting enough to keep. Thank goodness one doesn’t have to pay to get them developed these days.
Wooflfllffbbll !
That’s Olive’s tail you can just see, that flicks from side to side as she swims, using it like a propeller.
This time of year is the time of the local fête, where each village has a party over two, three or four days, our local one lasting four days. Part of the offerings this year included a demonstration of ‘Course Landaise’ where demonstrators leap over or dodge aside from running ‘vaches’. During the afternoon some amateurs (ie the rugby team) got involved and came away pretty bruised…
That hurt!
Then on Monday night at the closure of the fête there was the annual firework display based on the far side of the neighbouring river which as always, was very impressive and well appreciated by the enormous crowds.
'Feu d'artifice' in French
Everyone say 'aahhh' or 'ooohhh'
When it’s all over, the whole crowd swarmed back into Navarrenx and partied till the early hours. A very successful and profitable fête for the bars especially.
On wednesday a young german girl arrived at the bike shop with an unusual request. She had a very well-laden old steel bike and was trailing a terrier on a long lead. She’d been cycling from Spain and just sort of picked up the dog on the way. She said he’d decided to come with her but I bet he didn’t bank on her going quite so far! (she was on her way back to Germany). He’d managed to walk 40 or 50 kilometres per day over the last few days but she’d got fed up with him slowing her down or making a nuisance of himself laying over the back of her luggage.
You WILL like it in there Ricky!
Naturally her solution was for me to fix a basket onto her handlebars for him to sit in. Luckily I had a wire basket that had been laying around the shop for ages and with a bit of fiddling and scrounging for other bits we got it fitted to the handlebars.
A luxurious way to travel!
Ricky (named after Ricky Martin I like to think) weighed more than he looked and it was a problem keeping the basket from rubbing on the front tyre, but a scavenged metal bracket zip-tied to the frame sorted that. He even had a sumptuous blue dog blanket in there. I don’t know what he’ll be like going over any bumps though.
Let’s hope he made it all the way to his new home.
