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.

Puttin’ on Biarritz

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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

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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!

Cape Cod II – Setting Fourth

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Tuesday 4 July 2023 – My first-ever Fourth of July in the USA! We had two activities to look forward to, the first of which was Chatham town’s 4th July Parade. The Sheas had kindly offered to bring seats for us and told us where and when to meet them on Main Street.

At first, the auguries were not too positive. It rained very hard at about 0830, and the visibility as we walked from the hotel was not something that was too encouraging. Some people, it was also clear, had other priorities.

However, foggy or not, the rain appeared to be in abeyance as we approached the town and we got our first inkling of the atmosphere of the day.

It was clear that people had been out very early, or late yesterday, or possibly both, putting chairs out to reserve a place.

Some had even planned for the earlier rain.

It’s a remarkable and lovely characteristic of the town’s celebration that no-one apparently stole or moved any chairs. I can’t see that happening in the UK. Generally, as we headed to our agreed meeting place, the feeling in the air was of extreme geniality, with people wishing each other “Happy Fourth!” and generally having a good time.

Many had made a special effort to dress for the day.

We met the Sheas a few minutes before the parade was due to start at 0930, and settled ourselves down to watch.

It was spectacular!

For about an hour, all sorts of groups of people, floats, vehicles and bands walked past. If you’ve 45 minutes to spare, you can watch it all here – though content is blocked in Russia, in the unlikely event you’re there at the moment.

There were some great old cars,

bands,

local organisations and society branches,

and, generally, much exuberant behaviour.

It was clear that a huge effort had gone into spiffing up floats and vehicles. Some of the trucks were huge and really beautifully polished up for the day.

All in all, it was a lovely experience, even if it was celebrating the fact that the USA had given us Brits a beating some 240 years ago.

The rain even held off for almost all of the parade, which was good of it. Afterwards we went to the Squire Tavern (one of the businesses which had made a contribution to the parade), where the place was simply soggy with atmosphere.

John pointed out one of the quirks of the place, which is its collection of licence plates, sent in by devotees who want their contributions on view for all to see.

Rather than repeat the excesses of two days ago, we cut and ran after a single drink and headed back to the hotel, to regroup for our second activity of the day – whale watching. For this we had to head to Barnstable, some 15 miles away, and board, along with many other revellers, a pretty substantial boat.

Just after we boarded, the heavens opened

which made me rather pessimistic about what the evening might hold. But, dammit, we’d paid for the ticket so we were jolly well going to stick with it.

The plan was that we would spend an hour or so getting from Barnstable past Provincetown harbour (which is right in the palm of the hand if you think of Cape Cod as an arm with a crooked elbow) and out into more open waters to look for whales. The lass who was doing the commentary pointed out that there was no way to detect where they were; we had to rely on luck and the skipper. Also, as we sped along, it was clear that, well, it wasn’t clear; visibility was dreadful. I therefore set my expectations really low and indulged in a bit of sporadic conversation with the people who were sharing our table.

The great thing about low expectations is that they are easily exceeded. After less then an hour, the word began to spread around that whales had been spotted. But, given the poor visibility and also my previous whale-watching experiences (where humpbacks typically were visible in the distance, best seen with binoculars or a long telephoto lens), I initially though that it wouldn’t be worth even bothering to take a look.

I’m glad that I changed my mind on that one.

If you have eight minutes to spare, take a look at what unfolded:

For those of you without the luxury of even that short time, here’s a summary.

When I did go for a look, there were actually a couple of humpback whales – a mother and her calf – close to the boat.

They were much closer than I’d ever been to a (live, swimming, not at Sea World) whale before.

Initially, they did little more than lazily swim around and occasionally surface to breathe (giving us a chance, being downwind at one point, to experience the true horror of whalitosis). But after a while, we got a brilliant display of tail waving, fin slapping and – most dramatic of all, of course – breaching.

It was spectacular – we were truly lucky to have such a great display, and so close to the boat. The skipper did really well to get close to the whales without disturbing them so that they continued to disport themselves; it even looked like the mother was waving to us with a fin at times.

After such an inauspicious start, the whale watching turned out to be a splendid experience, made all the more satisfactory because I got some decent video from it, because, as everyone knows, if you can’t share photos or videos, it didn’t happen.

The weather by this stage had cheered up a little

So it looked like we might also enjoy the final piece of the day’s entertainment – the firework display at Provincetown harbour, which we would watch from the water.

Sadly, the weather had other ideas about that, particularly as it started.

The fog did lift a little as the display continued

But then its own smoke started to obscure it.

So the July 4th fireworks were not as spectacular as we might have hoped (frankly we do just as good a job every November in Chobham). But that couldn’t diminish the pleasure we felt at having had such a rewarding experience watching whales at play. By the time we got back to the hotel it was really very late, but we’d had a great Fourth Of July.

I’m actually writing this at home, completing the Cape Cod story after a nice farewell lunch with the Sheas, grinding our way to Boston airport and flying back to the UK. It’s been a really excellent few days in Cape Cod – meeting new/old friends, experiencing the charm of Chatham and re-acquainting myself with the highs and lows of Gunpowder Gin.

We rarely revisit anywhere on our travels, on the basis that there are always fresh and new places to seek out, experience and (in my case) photograph). The Azores has been one exception, and I rather think that Cape Cod might be another. We both feel that there’s a lot more to explore in those 339 square miles.

So that is all for New England. After some three-and-a-half excellent weeks there, we now have to prepare for our next adventure, which starts in just over a month. Come back some time soon after August 12 to find out what that will be, won’t you?