A day of R & R

Woke up this morning to the sunshine again - but not before a rather scary night at the hands of the dear dog. I must have been fast asleep ‘catching flies’ as they say when I suddenly became aware of a scratching noise and when I came to realised that Tom must have been having a bit of a lively dream - it involved running whilst lying down with your eyes shut. Thanks Tom! Anyway he settled down but it take a long time for me to do the same! Did the laundry - took me half an hour of popping Euro coins into the washing machine before I realised, I had to go to reception and get a ‘token’. Once I’d done this, I looked at the notice in the laundry and saw the instructions to do just that. Oh dear. Anyway, lovely walk out into the country so Tom could stretch his lovely legs. Back to sort the laundry to collect the washing and then a nice long walk up to the nearest roundabout and then on to another one where we found Lidl - not a lot that appealed, so off to the next Intermarche where we found all we needed to survive for the next few days. Had a spot of lunch involving a baguette - when doesn’t it! And had a couple of nice steaks for tea with a rather nice salad to accompany. After that we did some more planning for the journey ahead which starts tomorrow when we leave this lovely place and head for Lourdes. We are still not sure how this is going to work, but we are going to try. We have found an Aire on the outskirts and it’s a kilometre walk into Lourdes itself. Should be interesting, but I hope we won’t be disappointed as the last time we tried to get into a city it didn’t work out - fingers tightly crossed. Something happened this week which I keep meaning to mention. We were on our way here to Oloron in the van and we both noticed a small white van travelling towards us going rather slowly with his back doors open - we both assumed I think that whoever it was had maybe a mattress, a ladder, or some long lengths of wood sticking out the back, thereby making it difficult for him to shut his doors - imagine our surprise as we passed said vehicle to see a man on a bike attached to the van - full Tour gear on including helmet. Now he wasn’t on a piece of rope or anything - he seemed to be on the bike and was definitely between the open back doors and was attached to some kind of tow hitch. The cyclist must have been training I guess, but it did look rather strange. You can imagine that happening in the UK - ‘Elf and Safety’ would have a field day! Sorry it’s brief blog today, but hopefully have a more interesting one tomorrow. Nighty night.