Week 3 – Tuesday 15th July – St Jean Pied De Port and Pamplona

Well, what a day of sight seeing we’ve had today. We covered a triangle between Honda, St Jean Pied de Port in France and Pamplona in Spain. With a holiday in France yesterday, the trip started very slowly as we had to negotiate our way through more trucks that I’ve ever seen before. Getting onto the Motorway in France involved negotiating our way between lanes of “big rigs” queueing up to pay their tolls to get onto the motorway. We came onto the motorway just before the pay station. Whereever the trucks were coming from, they were already on the motorway feeder road, in the two inside lanes. We had to snake our way between these monster trucks. We were so much lower than they were, we weren’t even sure that they could see us and they didn’t seem to be giving us any more room than we needed.

After a short burst down the motorway, we headed off onto the scenic back roads to St Jean Pied de Port, a small town that John and Rebecca Clarkson had recommended to us, from their time living in Biarritz. The road to St J P d P was beautiful, running along the floor of a valley, with vineyards lining the sides of the valley. The town itself, is “picture postcard”, set on a small trout filled stream, with 3 arched bridges over it, flower adorned buildings running down the main street and an ancient citadel on the hill above the town. The surrounding country side is a combination of vineyards, fields and forests.

A walk along the main street identified some prime candidate restaurants for lunch, which we were both very much looking forward to having yet again missed breakfast and the mandatory coffee to start the day. We did our usual walk around the town and up to the Citadel on the top of the hill. The day was perfect, with deep blue skies and crisp green fields. Lunch was a lengthy affair of Mixed Hors D’oeuvres, a large of portion of a large chicken done Basque style (with a tomato and green pepper sauce) and a crème brulé for me, and a Basque Omlette (with tomato and green peppers), veal and a Basque Gateau – yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

After lunch we drove to Pamplona a bit over an hour away. The road is over a mountain pass, that rises to over 1000m. On the way, we saw lots of people walking with back packs and a scallop shell tied to them. This is symbol for walking the Camino de Santiago – The Christian Pilgrimage from Lourdes in France to Santiago De Compostella in North Western Spain (where we will be staying for a couple of nights next week). I’m not sure how long the whole route is, but we saw a sign on our trip to Pamplona saying that Santiago De Compostella was 790ks from there – get walking Pilgrims.

Pamplona was, I would have to say, slightly disappointing, in that I’d expected a smaller more historic town. However, we found a map of the town, so we could walk the route the bulls took. Although the festival had finished the previous day (and it was apparently a massive party on the last day), the town was entirely back to normal. We did get into the Bull Ring, where the “running” finishes and they were literally hosing it out. On our walk we saw lots of shops selling T-shirts of the event. There was one really neat cartoon T-shirt, that looked really cool, until you looked at it closely and realized it contained pictures of people getting gored by the bulls. Anne asked if the bulls were still in the bull ring, but I had to tell her that the end game for the bulls was not good and was quite literally “The End”.

The drive back to Honda was via a very scenic valley round that winded it’s way along beside a pretty river. It was slightly windier than normal because of the detours required to get around the massive excavations and constructions that are going on to put an elevated motorway through the valley. We were pleased to have done the road before the Motorway is completed, but traveling down the road amongst lots of trucks going both ways, on a road under construction, with the roof down, meant we got back to Honda feeling pretty dusty and dirty. A shower fixed that and we felt that we’d had a really good days sight seeing, with the lunch at St John Pied de Port one of the highlights of the holiday.

We’re just finishing this off, in near darkness sitting in the square outside the Parador having had another meal of Pintxos and a bottle of Blanco.