Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Assumption about Biarritz

4 Replies

Sun 13 August 2023 – My belief that our hotel room looked comfortable enough turned out to be erroneous. Our room is tiny – just barely larger than the bed, which itself is a standard double size rather than anything more luxurious. Furthermore, the convenience of our location near to the town centre brought with it a pitfall. Our room looked out over a busy square

which meant that, the town being busy, there was a lot of noise. Closing the windows mitigated the noise but meant the room became rather warm.

The town really was very busy – this is the square just below our window, seen from another angle –

and I thought that the crowds were simply due to it being the weekend. It turns out that we had unwittingly booked to stay here on the most crowded weekend of the year, the local equivalent of the UK’s August Bank Holiday. The reason for the popularity is the Assumption Day holiday, which falls on August 15th. This year, that’s a Tuesday, so everyone – everyone – in France is taking a long weekend, and all of them appear to have chosen Biarritz as their holiday destination.

This being the day before my birthday, one would have thought that at some stage in the last 70 years, I might have twigged that a major religious event was celebrated the day before. In my defence, it’s a Catholic celebration and I’m not Catholic in any way except, perhaps for my taste in gin.

The practical upshot was that last night was not a comfortable one for either of us. The only positive we can take from it is that it is at least preparing us for what we might encounter during the Camino. One hopes we’ll have more comfortable accommodation, but I think that we now know what the lowest common denominator is.

We survived. Obviously.

Breakfast was, I guess, pretty standard for the type of hotel we’re in – yoghurt, some fruit, croissants, cereals, tea or coffee. The hotel even had a single Twinings Earl Grey tea bag, showing that the proprietor is not entirely without soul. We took pity and used our own, just in case some future Brit comes a-brewing.

Then we went for a walk. Obviously.

We have two full days here, and are centrally based, so we decided today should be dedicated to pottering up the coast and tomorrow in the other direction. Walking north along the prom gives one a chance to understand the very colourful beach umbrellas that are erected by the side of the prom.

These are actually sort of “half tents” draped from umbrellas.

and you can see from the picture above that the preparedness of the tourists to part with €15 for shade and shelter was somewhat limited. Presumably there was someone who was in charge of renting these out but we never saw anyone in action demanding money with menaces.

Strolling the prom, tiddly on pom pom, takes one alongside the Grand Plage and then the Miramar Plage. Looking over the surrounding scenery and providing the dividing line between the two plages is the Grand Palace Hotel, which is a monster.

It was originally the palace built by Napoleon III for Empress Eugénie in 1855, because that was the sort of thing that emperors did in those days, and is now a hotel that is so exclusive that its website doesn’t encourage you (or even, it would appear, allow you) to book a room.

The objective of our wandering was the lighthouse, the tall white, sticky-uppy thing which can be seen in the distance from the town. It’s a pleasant walk to get there, past several vantage points giving nice views of the town and its surroundings,

as well as handsome beachside buildings.

When one gets to the destination of this walk (the phare* end, ho, ho),

there is (a) a bar and (b) more to see by way of decent view.

We took advantage of both of these options before wending our way gently back towards town. En route is “the Empress’s Viewpoint”

which gives you, surprise, surprise, a decent view back over the town (but nothing you haven’t already seen, to be honest). There are very many handsome villas, some of them historic,

It really is a very handsome town.

Arrival back to the town enabled us to take a quick visit to the hotel to drop off and pick up stuff (it was whilst chatting to the proprietor, Jerome, that we found out about the Assumption bit) and we decided to take a further look around the fisherman’s port area. After we’d had a couple of drinks back at Dodin, the very pleasant bar on the front, obvs.

Heading the other way from town takes one to the Port des Pêcheurs, the fishermen’s port. This is adjacent to the Grand Plage and delineated by a very picturesque stone bridge, which leads to a viewpoint back over the town.

It used to be a working fishing port, but is now the site of several eateries.

It would have been rude just to pass them all by, so we stopped for a late lunch at Le Corsaire. The area has some attractive corners as well.

The port is loomed over by the massive church of Saint Eugénie,

which was sadly closed for refurbishment. A shame; if the interior matches the exterior, it should be a seriously impressive place to visit.

After our visit to the port, it was time to get back to the hotel to review the day and plan the morrow. The Old Port lies beyond the Port des Pêcheurs and promises to be a rewarding place to wander around so that seems to be Plan A for our final full day in Biarritz. I hope you’d like to come back and see how we got on.

 

 

* Google the French for “lighthouse” if you are puzzled by this

Puttin’ on Biarritz

11 Replies

Saturday 12 August 2023 – The Adventure Begins!

There are several adventurous aspects to our peregrination, not the least of which is that I don’t have a laptop with me for editing the photos, as I thought the potential for losing it as we traverse Spain was unacceptably high. So, I have an Android tablet for the writing and Snapseed for editing the photos. Let’s see how the images come out.

Getting The Right Tea was another.

The mileage we have to achieve is, of course, the main one. You’ll have to wait to see how we cope with that.

Anyway, our departure from the UK started smoothly enough, with a comfortable, if traffic-beset taxi ride from leafy Surrey to, erm, Essexy Essex (to avoid a stressful morning journey to catch the flight, we’re staying overight at the Stansted airport Radisson Blu). It seemed that The Only Way To Essex was anticlockwise round the M25, and since we were doing that on a Friday afternoon there was quite a bit of congestion. But our driver, who was of southern Asian extraction and who identified himself to us under the unintuitive name of Timmy, was very engaging and we had  discussions about faiths (starting from us talking about the Camino as being originally a pilgrimage route) and various aspects of his health, where I feel we were able to make some practical suggestions. The 90-minute journey actually took three hours, but we weren’t in a rush so that didn’t matter.

The hotel has a very splendid atrium with the bar in the middle being called the “Wine Tower” for, it would seem, a good reason.

Sadly, its attendant cabaret – someone being hoisted acrobatically up to retrieve wine bottles – is no longer in action.  Jane and I have seen a similar tower elsewhere, but we can’t remember exactly where. We do agree, though, that it was likely somewhere more exotic than Essex. The hotel itself is a slightly odd mixture of modern and faded – the room, for example, featured both USB and and LAN sockets, and I haven’t used an RJ45 ethernet cable in a hotel for decades. But it was comfortable and provided the necessary food and drink, with a decent breakfast.

If one lives west of London, as we do, there has to be a compelling reason to fly from Stansted. Ours was a desire to spend a couple of pre-Camino relaxing days in Biarritz, which is a name redolent of French decadence (the finest kind) and a location reasonably close to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, which will be the starting point of our peregrination. And if the question is “how does one fly from London to Biarritz?”, the answer is “by Ryanair from Stansted”. It’s a liberal interpretation of London’s location, but, on the basis that it was the only option, we decided to go for it. If Stansted is good enough for Harry Kane, it’s good enough for us.

Having never experienced the airport, our transit through Stansted was sufficient to confirm our opinion of what it would be like, which is thoroughly functional – effecive but with few concessions to ambience. It’s perfectly clean and safe but everywhere you look in the departures area there are queues; I think Stansted is the place where queues go to die. The middle third of the terminal, the Ryanair bit, was a striking exemplar of the genus. One had a choice of two queues, both of which were huge.  We chose the one for the self-scan bag drop, which wound round several kilometres within the building, but, to be fair, it moved swiftly and it took barely 20 minutes for us to check our bags in.

Security threatened to be a big queue, but we’d paid for Fast Track, so it wasn’t actually too bad. Finally, with a single bound, we were free and headed off through the duty free area, which, according to my Garmin device, stretched over a quarter of a mile, until we could finally sit down with a Glass Of Something. Sadly, this respite was cut short by the Ryanair app on Jane’s phone telling us that we really needed to head to gate 47 in order to board the flight. Once comfortably established there, we were told that, actually, sorry, haha, they meant Gate 45, so we all moved there in order to stand in another queue before they let us into the jetway, where there was another queue

before we filed along the jetway to another queue on the tarmac

whilst we waited for them to let us on to the aircraft. All in all it was a bit trying, but we departed only about 30 minutes late, and timing wasn’t critical, so we just let it happen. When we arrived, it was a delight to discover that our bags had made exactly the same journey as we had. But possibly with rather less queuing.

Our hotel, Le Petit Hôtel, distinguished itself by being rejected as a reasonable destination by the first taxi driver in the line outside the airport, Perhaps he was just objecting to the fact that we were strangers, I don’t know. The last laugh is on him, because he’s clearly the foreigner. Fortunately, the second in line felt able to take our business and dropped us off as near to the hotel as he could.

Which is not outside it, but quite close.

The hotel is exactly as described on the tin, i.e. small. Actually, it’s more of a bed-and-breakfast. However, it looks comfortable enough and it is very well situated for the centre of this particular ville; our room looks out over the old casino building.

So, having arrived in Biarritz, what to do? Go for a walk. Obviously.

With apologies to Irving Berlin (if you don’t know the original song, then skip lightly over the italics section):

Have you seen the great to-do
Up near Londres Avenue?
On that foreign thoroughfare
Just arrived by RyanAir

“Hi, there, we’re pilgrim heroes,
Just need to get some Euros.
Then seek gins with lime
For a wonderful time.”

If you’re blue, and you don’t know where to go to
Why don’t you laugh at these two Brits
Doin’ Biarritz?

Come with me and read about their long journey
Walking to Spain;  these two nitwits
Start in Biarritz.

I find it amusing that the film in which this song was featured was called “Idiot’s Delight”. It starred Clark Gable, so of course I identify strongly with it.

Anyway.

We went out to explore Biarritz, and a delightful place it is, too. It has faded from the glory of its pomp as a place where posh people go, but it’s easy to see why it retains some of its magic. Somehow it manages to get away with the tacky beach vibe (multi-coloured tat in the beachside shops)

alongside dignified – expensive – cocktail bars on the prom

and a wide selection of eateries all over the place, One of them was just about to open and was clearly The Place To Be.

(This reminded me of the queue outside Cafe Opera in Stockholm, in the bad old days of the 1980s when it was the most popular queue in the city.)

We sampled a creperie and a cocktail bar whilst taking a look at the bits of the town near us.

It’s clearly an interesting place and we’re looking forward to exploring it in more detail over the next couple of days before we go down to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port to start our walking.

But now it’s late at night and I’ve been struggling with the hotel’s WiFi to write this, so I’m headed for bed after a long, but absorbing day.  Please come back soon and I hope I will have more for you about this interesting old town.

Peregrination

18 Replies

Monday 24 July 2023 – The excitement in the Burridge-Walker household is verging on the palpable as we head towards our next adventure.  The tension about the adventure itself is considerable (read on for details), but is as nothing compared with that of an update to this website.  Let me deal with that first.

I like, of course, to let people know when I publish a new post to this blog.  Several readers currently get a notification, to mobile device or web browser, to let them know when another post has gone up.  However, the method I have used thus far (called PushEngage) seems not to be a very robust way of ensuring everyone is informed; several people have reported that they no longer receive notifications.

This is tragic, and not to be tolerated.

Therefore, I have updated the machinations of the website so that it is now possible to subscribe with an e-mail address which will receive a notification of every new post. I’d thus ask everyone who is still receiving notifications (or, well, anybody, actually) to activate this new subscription method, to give me greater confidence that people do indeed get wind of new material on the blog.

Please, therefore, provide some kind of an anodyne comment and an e-mail address, and tick the “Notify me of new posts” box at the foot of this post to activate your subscription.  I will shortly remove the old push method to save duplication.

And now – the adventure!

When Jane and I arrive somewhere on our holidays travels, among the first things we do is to go for a walk. Obviously.  Many times I have referred to this as a “peregrination”, without, really, a second thought as to what the word really means. This year, however, we are challenging ourselves with a proper peregrination.

Based on our enjoyment of the experience of walking around the outside of Menorca, we (i.e. Jane) sought out other walks.  One of the obvious candidates was the Camino de Santiago, something that has been achieved, in whole or in part, by friends of ours in recent years, thus providing no small measure of inspiration.  We had originally planned to do this last year, but various pandemic-related issues put it back to 2023.

So it (we hope) will be that on August 16 2023 we take our first steps along the Camino Francés, a 480-mile (770km) journey, starting in France and ending, if we make it, at the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.  Being not entirely masochistic, we are getting our bags transferred for us whilst “all” we have to do is to walk; this, and our accommodation and itinerary, have been organised for us by a company called, imaginatively, “Walk the Camino”. They have provided masses of helpful material, among which is a detailed book about the Camino itself, historically a pilgrimage trail to the Cathedral, which houses the tomb of the apostle St. James.

The Spanish for “pilgrim”? Peregrino. In Jane’s case, Peregrina, I suppose.

Hence “peregrination”. Obviously.

To be clear, we’re not undertaking this for any particular religious or spiritual reasons, but simply to challenge ourselves. Spirituality will come in the form of a large gin and tonic at the end of each day. As ever we’re living dangerously when it is safe to do so, as the Camino is a very popular endeavour, with many people undertaking it and a well-established support framework along the way. And a few bars, restaurants and coffee stops. Obviously. (Wouldn’t do it, otherwise – do you think I’m mad?)

Many peregrinos undertake the Camino on a day-to-day basis, walking as far as they can be arsed feel comfortable before seeking accommodation, often in a hostel.  Our plan is more structured, and we’ll be staying in pre-booked and decent quality hotels, since I’m way beyond the age where sharing a room with many other people or having to get dressed to visit the loo during the night count as acceptable conditions. We’ll have the occasional rest day, too. I expect that it will be on those rest days that I bring this blog up to date; I can’t imagine that three dozen entries all saying “got up – had breakfast – walked – got a drink – ate supper – went to bed” would make interesting reading, so I’ll aim to focus just on the highlights, and use the rather natty Relive app to record and share scenes along the way.

That said, there will be some days worth describing individually, such as day 1, which basically involves crossing the Pyrenees and which I expect will give me a great deal to complain write about. We’ll also spend a couple of days beforehand in Biarritz, which should be interesting to look round.

Photographically, I have decided that I don’t want to have to deal with the extra weight of a Big Camera – and the time overhead of processing loads of RAW images – so the Nikon will be staying at home and I’ll use my phone to record everything.

Let’s see how it all goes!

I’d be very pleased if you took the time to subscribe to the blog so that you receive the updates as we go along – provide a comment and an e-mail address below and tick the “Notify” box.

Hasta la vista!