Tonight we are in Biarritz, France. How's that for fancy?
We headed out of La Rochelle this morning, very impressed with what a lovely small town it was. We thought about Bordeaux, but decided against it. The experience in Rennes really put us off the traffic hassle of the big cities, and Bordeaux certainly is a big city. Shane and Sonia met there, and as the saying goes, 'they will always have Bordeaux'. But Jan and I don't have any special affinity for it, it is just one more big city to us. And Shane didn't have to drive into the crazy French traffic or confront the roundabouts, a cruise ship dropped him there at the dock and took him and Sonja away the next day.
So down the road we went and the next place that tickled our fancy was Biarritz, so we pulled in off the road and looked around. The expected traffic hassles, roundabouts, crazy French drivers, etc, etc, etc. But in the end, we found ourselves in a parking garage down near the water, underground, we thought somewhere near the beach. We got out of the car and heard, wait for it, Symphony music playing in the parking garage. Not just somebody leaving their radio on, but playing from the speakers in the parking lot. Go figure, that's got to be a pretty high-hat place to have that kind of music going on. We walked outside from our stall, two levels below our entry level. How'd we do that? The city is built on a cliff, and the parking garage has its entry at the top of a hill and the exit at beach level, and every parking level has a walking exit to the outdoors. Miracles will never cease. So out we went, and what a view. See the pictures, a great broad golden beach, stretching for miles, waves breaking, and a clump of about a dozen surfers catching the shore breaks. Amazing, see the pictures, they are much better than my words.
We walked and wandered, down the walkway to the beach, all around the town, into the casino, down the boardwalk, watched the surfers, etc. Again, the pictures much better than my words.
Except for a couple of things. First, the local Catholic Church must have been damaged during WWII, I guess. It has bullet holes all over the front of the place, an amazing array of marks and scars. I'm no fan of organized religion, but even I wouldn't take a gun and start shooting at a church. Whoever did that was full of hatred and painly nuts.
Second, the surfers. All guys, about 16 or 18 years old, and the best looking bunch of guys that I have ever seen. I'm no judge, I know, and I'm not into guys anyway, so why am I going on about it? It's just that I have never seen a group of people whom nature has smiled on in such an obvious way as this dozen or so. So full of life, attractive, bubbling over with enthusiasm, and fit, just the way you would expect the beautiful people living the beautiful life in a beautiful and rich French town should look. Like they just stepped out of the pages of Gentleman's Quarterly, or from a movie set somewhere, you get the picture. Wonderful, all we could do as we sat there in the bistro and had our wine and pizza, was smile and wonder and admire.
Then home to bed, and plan tomorrow. Or not plan it, just see where it takes us.
