Tag Archives: spain

Monday 5th November 2018 – IT ALL WENT …

… rather haywire today.

The alarms at 06:00, 06:10 and 06:20 all went off. I know because I heard them and even switched them off. But it was more like 08:15 when I finally brought myself round well enough to crawl out of the stinking pit.

The fact that I had been on a voyage during the night is neither here nor there – and I won’t tell you about it because you are probably all eating your tea right now.

So a late start means a late breakfast of course. And a pile of things that I meant to do were rather shunted aside for now. The most important – a form that I must complete – I made a good start on it and it won’t take long to finish off.

Another thing that I carried on with is the project that involves a huge mound of photos going back to Time Immemorial. I’ve been gradually working my way through these here and there, and another huge pile have been classed as irrelevant and filed under CS

A session on the bass too. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good play around.

Lunchtime was indoors today. Autumn has definitely arrived and it’s no longer pleasant to sit outside. That’s how it’s going to be until the end of March, I reckon.

The High Arctic too. I’ve been pushing along with that too. And I’ve reworked two of the pages that I’ve been doing. The order runs better like this, but that’s not to say that it won’t be changed again in due course before it’s published.

What with one thing and another (and once you make a start you’ll ne surprised at how many other things there are) I was late going out for my afternoon walk today

But just in time to notice, away in the distance, a huge ship sailing … “dieseling” – ed … along out in the English Channel.

A little bit of crop, enlarge and enhance will be able to bring it out.

But in the meantime, there are a few things much closer to home that need attention.

Like the beach at the Pointe du Roc for example. I don’t recall having seen it properly from this angle before.

It looks very inviting but there’s no way down to it right now.

And out just off the coast is this little yacht.

I was going to say something about it sailing along in the breeze but if you notice carefully, there are no sails hoisted. So he’s dieseling along too.

It beats the purpose of having a yacht if you ask me – especially with all of this wind that we have around here.

Talking of the wind, we were having another windy day again today. It’s a mystery that our intrepid yachtsman isn’t taking advantage of it.

And the wind was pushing the tide well in. The tidal co-efficient isn’t very high today, but you would never have thought so with looking at this.

And it’s not high tide for another hour or so either.

The crowds down there on the Plat Gousset were certainly enjoying the weather this afternoon.

I cropped out a bit of the previous photograph and blew it up (which I can do these days despite modern anti-terrorist legislation) and you can see how powerful the winds are today.

Quite a few of those people will be having an unexpected shower if they aren’t careful.

Round the corner in the harbour we were having a couple of interesting shops to see.

I know the sailing ship that is there, but as usual these days I can’t remember her name. I’m going to have to prepare some kind of database of ships here so that I can bring them to my fingertips.

And I was admiring the paint job on the trawler too. We all know that the vital statistics of a mermaid are 36-24-£3:60 per kilo.

Bearing in mind the maritime traffic that I had seen earlier, I decided to change the habits of a lifetime.

And so I continued my walk by incorporating a promenade down to the end of the road and around the headland.

And found a suitable place to couple up the zoom/telephoto lens

I took several photos of the ship and cropped out the interesting bits.

Back here, I blew them up and enlarged them, because despite … “you said that just now” – ed.

And if you are wondering about the poor quality of the images just let me mention that the photos were taken of the ship as it sailed into the entrance road to the harbour at St Malo down the Brittany coast.

And that’s 38 kms – 22 miles – away, so you can’t really complain about the quality of the image at all

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Ship of the Day, so let’s all say hello to Pont Aven, the flagship of the Brittany Ferries fleet.

She’s on her way into St Malo with the afternoon ferry from Portsmouth. Mind you, last week she was seen in Cobh in Ireland and also Santander in Spain, so she gets about a bit

This view of Pont Aven is cropped out and enlarged 200%, and while you admire it, I’ll tell you a little about her.

Built by Meyers in Germany, she displaces about 41,000 tonnes, was launched in 2004 and is powered by FOUR Caterpillar 12-cylinder engines.

185 metres long and 32 metres wide, she has a capacity of 650 cars and 2,400 passengers.

While I had the zoom/telephoto lens on the camera I took another photo of the Plat Gousset from the headland at the Pointe du Roc.

The wind seems to have died down during the half-hour or so that it had taken me to walk all the way down here.

No waves splashing up over the promenade soaking the passers-by right now. In fact, there are considerably fewer passers-by out there now.

From this viewpoint there’s a really good view of the beach at Donville-les-Bains too, including that building where I saw that depressing apartment 18 months ago.

The houses on the clifftop just there look quite interesting too. I wouldn’t mind trying to rent a room in one of those, as long as it overlooks the sea.

Back here, I encountered a neighbour and we had a good chat for a while. And then I came in here and finished off the grapes from Saturday.

Tea was a stuffed pepper and rice – and beautiful it was too. And then a walk around the headland in the dark.

Now I’m going to try to have an early night. And maybe I’ll be up in time to do some work tomorrow.

Monday 3rd March 2014 – LAST NIGHT’S HOTEL …

… was called the Hotel de la Paix at Oloron Ste Marie, and a good choice it was too.

But I wasn’t alone in my room last night. Frankie Howerd, who as you know is my favourite comedian, came in with the script for his new “Carry On” film, all 391 pages of it, and so much of the night was taken up with reading it.

And I can still remember quite a lot of the script too this morning. I’ll have to sit and write it all down before I forget it. I could be on to something here.

And so with raging toothache yet again, I loaded up Caliburn and sat down to check the route for the next stage of my journey.

But something was clearly not correct as it made no sense at all, and after puzzling over the map for a good 20 minutes I realised that somehow in plotting my route I had turned over two pages of the map at once and I had driven myself up an impasse, as it were.

Consequently I decided to follow the Lady Who Lives In The Satnav for the route today and she took me via Tarbes and Pau and then right across the foothills of the Pyrenees – having me stuck behind a caravanette on a narrow series of lanes for a good 60 km.

Loads of interesting things to see but I wasn’t in any mood to stop and look – this toothache ws driving me mad. I felt like finding a dentist and having allof my teeth taken out – something like back in the 1970s when Malcolm Allison had been appoined team coach at Crystal Palace Football Club. He went to the dentist to have his teeth taken out, and they fitted seats instead.

I finally met up with my route but The Lady etc etc had found me a route that seemed to be much shorter than mine so I followed that and ended up in Spain again.

She brought me to a town called Vielha and it’s a strange situation here because all the rivers flow north into France and we have the headwaters of the River Garonne here. The International boundary is not a watershed as you might think.

And as an aside, here I was stopped for a spot-check by a Spanish Police road patrol.

The Lady Who etc etc had designs on sending me up the Valle de Aran, so it seemed. That’s a huge ski area with loads of faciiities, and the road up there goes through passes at well over 2000 metres. Ahh well – in for a penny, in for a pound.

But it wasn’t to be. About 15kms up the road and well into the snow, we encountered a sign “closed to all vehicles not equipped with chains” – and even local 4×4 drivers were chaining up for the route. They know the area so much better than I do and they’ve been driving in snow for a lot longer than I have, so if they are chaining up, what chance do I have with Caliburn?

The Lady Who Lives etc etc was rather annoyed about me retracing my steps but discretion is the better part of valour.

We carried on south through the enormous Tunnel de Vielha – this road would have been so much fun to drive 30 years ago before the tunnel had been built, I reckon – and this brought me out on the southern side of the Pyrenees and, would you believe, into the sun.

She took me off the main road and we climbed up and up and up to the aptly-named Col de Perves, where Strawberry Moose stopped for a photo opportunity as you might expect. With a name like that, he just had to.

A few flakes of snow fell onto the camera lens, but nothing much to worry about. There was hardly a trace of snow on the ground anywhere around here.

Not so over there, though.

That was where I actually should have been – climbing up out of the Valle de Aran and over the top to the town of Sort which is just on the other side of those mountains over there. This was turning into something of an enormous detour.

And if you thought that the climb up the Col de Perves was exciting, the descent was even more so.

The town of Perves is situated just below the summit and there is a track from there that leads straight downhill – clearly back before the days of the motor-car the peasants were a hardy lot – but for modern vehicles there’s a road something like this – and several good kilometres of it too. Where I’m standing is about half-way down but it’s the first good photo opportunity where there is some kind of parking.

By now though the weather has considerably brightened up and I was really enjoying the day, had it not been for this raging toothache that was putting the dampers on just about everything.

And we hadn’t finished with the mountains yet either.

We ended up climbing up a mountain pass or two via a road that was barely wide enough to take Caliburn and that was exciting when we met a couple of vehicles coming the other way. But once we arrived in Sort (about two hours after the time I should have been here) the rest of the journey was comparatively straightforward. A couple of mountain passes to be sure, but we are on N-roads, the equivelent of A-roads in the UK and I arrived at my ultimate destination, the little country of Andorra, without further ado.

But this toothache is driving me berserk and I went straight to bed, where I promptly crashed out, and that was that.

-3

Sunday 2nd March 2014 – I CAN’T LEAVE …

… Hendaye without showing you a photo of the beach here.

It stretches for over three kilometres, and even in the dismal weather that we were having this morning, it looked quite impressive. It really is a shame that the weather has conspired to defeat me on this little journey. Hendaye has always been a place high on my list to visit, and I can’t believe that the weather has let me down.

The town might not be up to too much but the seafront is certainly from another time – the Belle Epoque of the period from 1890 to 1929 (minus the war of course) as you can tell from some of the magnificent buildings here.

It costs a king’s ransom to rent a flat there as you might expect but, surprisingly, the restaurant is quite “democratic” in its prices and the vegetable risotto that I had the first night here was excellent, in both quality and price.

This is ice-station Zebra where I stayed for a couple of nights.

They had fixed the hot water by this morning but not the heating, but I’m not complaining. All hotels are under repair during the close season – it’s part of the fun of travelling at this time of year – and they made me a handsome reduction on the price as well as including the (copious) breakfast free of charge to make up for the inconvenience. Chapeau to the Hotel Bellevue!

Diesel is about 10 cents a litre cheaper in Spain and so Caliburn, Strawberry Moose
and I crossed the border and fuelled up.

From there we followed the border for quite a way – but on the Spanish side.

Neither Caliburn nor Strawberry Moose have been to Spain before and so here’s a photo of Caliburn to prove that he was here. Strawberry Moose will be having a better photo-opportunity in due course.

Watch this space.

But there’s all kinds of interesting things to see at the roadside. Here in a pub car park (or what passes as a pub in Spain) there was a steam locomotive.

Built by the Lokomotivbau Karl Marx in Babelsberg (East Germany, of course), this is build number 16005 of 1950 and is probably one of the 4000-odd narrow-gauge steam locomotives built for the East German narrow-gauge railway network.

What it’s doing here is a mystery but one thing is certain in that it won’t be going anywhere else. It’s in a dreadful state.

We climbed back into France over the Col d’Ispeguy, all 672 metres of it. This was the scene of a battle between the French and the Spanish in June 1794 and it’s clearly a sensitive military area as even today there are the remains of a great number of military defences guarding the Pass.

These though are likely to be something to do with World War II. Spain was neutral during the War but Hitler had asked Franco for permission to send an army across Spain to besiege Gibraltar. This was a logical step, as it would have closed the Mediterranean to British forces and led to the collapse of the British position in North Africa.

Franco refused and, apparently, gave Hitler such a verbal mauling that Hitler emerged shaken from the intervie and declared that he would rather go to have all of his teeth pulled at the dentist that have another discussion with Franco. Franco would be well-aware of the importance of Gibraltar, convinced that the Germans would invade Spain in order to capture the Rock, and doubless ordered these fortifications to be built.

Hitler’s failure to force the issue with Franco was the first nail in the Nazi coffin, in my opinion.

But as I have said before, the power of vehicle advertising is teemendous. Here I was sitting at the top of the Col d’Ispeguy quietly eating my butty and admiring the view into France when there was a knock on the window of Caliburn. As a result I ended up doing a site visit for a French guy in the area.

It will come to nothing as he’s at the bottom of a steep-sided valley and won’t have the sun for more than 4 or 5 hours per day in summer, but nevertheless, it just shows …

Next part of the route was to take me from Ahaxe to Tardets on a road that is something of a roller-coaster of half a dozen mountain passes of well over 1000 metres – up there somewhere.

However on turning off onto the lane there was a large gate, all padlocked off, with “road closed” all over it. Not that I’m surpised. It’s been raining for much of the day and it’s quite cold so snow up there is an odds-on certainty. And it’s not as if it’s a main road – or even a minor road, come to that.

I ended up having to come by the Col d’Osquich, Mauléon, Cheraute (where I was lucky enough to catch an exciting football match) and Barcus, and now I’m cosily esconced in a hotel opposite the railway station at Oloron Sainte-Marie where I’ll be spending the night.

It’s nice and warm here and the shower works. Just what the doctor ordered.

-3

Saturday 1st March 2014 – IT’S CARNAVAL …

… in San Sebastian today. That’s about half an hour down the coast in Spain, and Yours Truly having made enquiries, off he went.

There’s a train that runs from Hendaye to San Sebastian and places beyond, and you have to look for it in a corner of the car park of the SNCF railway station.

Apparently it’s not welcome within the main station, even though it is the only rail passenger service that runs across the border. I’m not quite sure why, as there were endless streams of people dragging suitcases and the like across the car park from one to the other.

A nice modern train as you can see, clean, tidy and airy and for all of that distance it cost just €2:40, which has to be a bargain in anyone’s money.

Eat your heart out, British rail passengers. No wonder I didn’t take Caliburn with me. It would have cost more than that for the diesel. He can have a day off.

But, in the kind of thing that can only happen to me, we had the wettest day in Spain so far this year. This only ever happens when I want to go there. The last time I went to Spain – in 1998 I think – was the first time that they had had snow for over 50 years.

We had storms as well, if you peer through the raindrops on the lens of the camera.

Another wild windy day and I spent a good few minutes watching the waves dashing a few huge pieces of timber and tree trunks against the promenade. Anyone who wonders just how the sea can break up a huge ship would have had the enigma solved for them this afternoon in this comparatively sheltered bay, watching the waves play about with this wood.

But there are also loads of morons about in the world, and not a few of them here in this bay.

It’s all very well surfing in a storm, if that’s really what you want to do, but looking at how the waves were treating the wood that was being washed into the bay, anyone being hit by a lump of wood (of which there were plenty) or a tree trunk would know about it – and so would his friends.

But the carnaval was a wash-out as you might expect. There were loads of people all dressed up to entertain, and several floats disceetly parked up in side streets, but no-one on the streets to watch.

And that was hardly surprising. I wouldn’t put a dog outside in the weather that we were having. Never mind the plain and the down the drain, the rain in Spain fell mainly down the back of my neck.

So I caught an early train home, but not before I had had something to eat.

And that was pretty easy too in San Sebastian. That’s an extract from the menu from one mainstream restaurant just next to the cathedral, and the restaurant next door had vegan options too. Not only that, I found two others without even trying. Puts much of Europe and almost all of North America to shame.

And the hummus? Delicious!

But another thing too – I’m collecting pics of football grounds while I’m on my travels, and Real Sociedad play here in San Sebastian. Furthermore, the club’s ground is just outside one of the railway stations along the route.

This calls for a photo opportunity of course, and there’s a handy hill right by the ground from which a good viewpoint might be had.

But count the number of gates that you can see at the ground. It gives the lie to the club putting all their Basques in One Exit.

I’ll get my coat.

-3

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality

Tag Archives: spain

Monday 5th November 2018 – IT ALL WENT …

Monday 3rd March 2014 – LAST NIGHT’S HOTEL …

Sunday 2nd March 2014 – I CAN’T LEAVE …

Saturday 1st March 2014 – IT’S CARNAVAL …

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