Tag Archives: Tourism

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 I – Chatham House Rules

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Monday 3 July 2023 – After an excellent fortnight spent with the in-laws in New Hampshire, we decamped to Cape Cod for a couple of days of R&R before flying home.  In theory, it’s a journey of some three hours. In practice – five hours.  Cape Cod (the name, coined in 1602, is the ninth oldest English place-name in the USA) is actually an island, separated from the mainland by a river, and there are just two bridges across on to it, so one can expect there to be some congestion.  What we hadn’t really internalised was the date and its likely consequences.  We were travelling on Saturday 1st July, and one of the biggest holidays of the American year was the following Tuesday, meaning that standard procedure was for people to take the Monday off, thereby giving them a nice long weekend.  A sufficiently large number of these folk had obviously said to themselves, “I know! We’ll go to Cape Cod for the holidays!”.

We eventually arrived to our hotel, the Chatham Bars Inn – Chatham is a town right on the elbow of Cape Cod, and its distance from the Sagamore bridge came as something of a surprise to me. I hadn’t really grasped the scale of Cape Cod – I had thought it to be a small peninsula but it actually covers 339 square miles and Chatham is some 35 miles away from the Sagamore bridge.

We drew up outside the hotel and one of the many greeters milling about outside the place asked us what name the booking was under.  Since Jane had done all the organising of this trip (same as all our trips, since she’s terrifically good at it) she gave her name, but the chap looked puzzled when he couldn’t find it.  For some reason the booking had become in my name, which was a puzzle.  But we did at least have a booking, so we made our way to our room, which was only a short drive away – Chatham Bars Inn is actually a resort, with many different bits of accommodation and facilities spread over quite an area.

It was latish, so we decided just have a room service meal before turning in.  Delightfully, the room had a kettle and two large mugs, so we added cold milk to the room service order and we were able to relax with a cup of Twining’s finest Earl Grey tea, which we’d thought to bring with us.  Regrettably, we hadn’t thought to bring gin or tonic with us, so the nice fridge in the room was to be used only to keep the milk cold.

Before we had set out to the USA on this trip, we (i.e. Jane) had only arranged one excursion for our time here, of which more in due course.  However, whilst whooping it up with the family in New Hampshire, Jane had reconnected with someone she had met at her sister-in-law’s wedding and hadn’t seen for the forty years since then – a chap called John Shea.  It turned out that he and his wife, Lynn, had a house in Chatham, and so we had made an informal arrangement to meet them whilst we were in Cape Cod.  The informal arrangement became a formal decision to meet at the hotel’s Beach House Grill for lunch on the Sunday, so off we went at the agreed time, to find it was very crowded and very busy –

and the wait for a table was likely to be 45 minutes. There was nothing for it then but to order ourselves a drink whilst we awaited our table and the Sheas.  Both turned up pretty much simultaneously after only about 15 minutes, so we sat down to a pleasant lunch and continued the process of catching up with the intervening 40 years. It was a delightful lunch, but after that, things went careering off at an unexpected tangent, and it was entirely – entirely – the fault of this man.

He is called Patrick and he works behind the bar at the Beach House Grill. It became clear from their familiarity with all the bar staff that the Sheas were good and loyal customers of this particular bar, and so Patrick made sure that we were very well served. Very well served.  It just seemed like a good idea to keep having another drink when he suggested it.  As for the rest of the day, recollection became a little hazy, but we did a lot of laughing as well as a lot of drinking before finally escaping from the Devil Patrick Gin Vortex and heading for bed.

When we surfaced this morning, we had suffered remarkably little damage beyond a spectacular bar bill, so the day lay before us awaiting our pleasure.  So we went for a walk. Obviously.

Before we set out we fortified ourselves with a good breakfast, during which I got an insight into how rich people and American service interact.  I wanted to order an omelette, which would be cooked for me as I waited.  The omelette chef was busy cooking a couple of omelettes for other people.  When he’d finished one, he offered it to the chap who’d ordered it – who turned it down because it wasn’t egg whites only and was a bit runnier than he liked.  Had I been in that situation, I would have done the Very British Problems thing of being too embarrassed to make a fuss and just eaten the damn’ thing anyway.  But he was American, this was a five-star hotel and so he said that it wasn’t what he wanted.  The chef binned it with a swiftness that quite startled me and started cooking another one, which the chap eventually decided was what he wanted.

It is clear that the Chatham Bars Inn is quite the operation and had geared itself up to provide fun and frolics throughout the July 4th holiday weekend.

One of today’s entertainments was a carnival, so we thought we’d look in on it, since our planned walking route went past its location.

There were lots of fun things for kids to do and it seemed reasonably popular and well-organised.  But there was no bar, so we decided to get on with our walk. Only joking; I really didn’t feel like having any alcohol after the excesses of yesterday.

We ended up walking some seven miles around the area, which is achingly pretty.

There are some lovely-looking houses along the route,

with some quirky details

and much evidence of preparing for July 4th.

We passed Chatham Lighthouse

Stage Harbour, with boats as far as the eye could see

and eventually wound our way back through Chatham town, which is, you guessed it, also achingly pretty.

It has a fine array of stores, some of which are really rather niche.

A park in the town called Gould Park was hosting an art exhibition, imaginatively entitled Art In The Park, which had a distinctive theme

and some wonderful work.

It was possible, should you wish, to bid for any of these items with the proceeds going towards “making Chatham a wonderful and fun place in which to live, do business, stay and visit, shop, and enjoy all the attractions of this great town.”

We headed back to the hotel to complete our walk

with just one diversion to look at the commercial fishing pier, where we bumped into the Sheas again, which was a pleasant surprise.  This gave us a chance to make further arrangements for The Big Day tomorrow – Chatham’s Fourth of July Parade.  The plan is that we will join them to watch the parade.  Since they know the area, they will know where to pitch up; and they might even have seats for us, which will be splendid.  This will be the first Fourth I’ve ever experienced and I must say I’m looking forward to  it.  I will, of course, report further in these very pages, so keep your eyes peeled to see how we got on.

By the time we got back to the hotel, it was pretty nearly time for an early dinner, which we took in the hotel’s Veranda, with a lovely view

and some very traditional American advertising tactics.

After dinner, we passed another bar where people were taking advantage of the good weather

and were being entertained by a guitar-playing singer and his accompanist,

who it appears had fashioned a percussion instrument out of an old speaker cabinet.

Thus ended the day, and so we have a Fourth Of July to look forward to tomorrow, with a parade and another excursion (as I type this, it sounds like someone is having a bit of firework practice for the morrow). To find out about that, you’ll have to come back and Read All About it tomorrow. Or possibly the day after…..