Country Road Take Me Home(Glen Campbell)We continue south, Bordeaux to Lourdes,France

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Our short stay at Taillon-Medoc has been comfortable enough even though the apartment was much more compact than the previous places we have stayed in on the BBA V3.

Our host Wilhelm wasn’t home when we were ready to leave but he said just to leave the key in the door and he would know we had departed when he returned home. Another very trusting host.

We chose the shortest road option on the GPS south to Lourdes and the first 50 odd kilometres was on the highway.

Joining the highway from the rocade the speed limit quickly increased from 90kph to 110kph and then 130kph, the first road in France we have encountered this limit.

Cars weren’t speeding past us as we came to grips with the higher speed limit then seemingly out of the blue a vehicle marked with a funeral company business on it shot passed easily doing the 130kph limit. It was travelling so fast we didn’t have time to see whether they were transporting a deceased person in the back!

Slotting in on the right hand lane we trailed the line of trucks that are restricted to 90kph on the highway moving in and out on the left hand lane to overtake them.

Early on during the highway drive we noticed that an accident had occurred on the highway going north and that a long queue of vehicles had come to a stop for what was at least 5 kilometres. Thank goodness our way ahead was clear.

As we expected the views from the higway weren’t particularly interesting and we were pleased when Gina directed us off the highway and onto the D834 a much lesser road with a speed limit of 90kph.

We started over the area known as the Grande Lande which is part of a greater area of 1.5 million hectares covered mostly by pine trees with the occasional small town around which there was some cultivated farmland that didn’t look very productive. The pine trees were spindly and it was hard to see what value they would have had. There did not appear to be any felling and milling of the trees at least close to the D834.

We passed through small towns with names such as Pissos and directions to the town of Sore!

There was very little traffic on the road as we continued south although this changed as we reached the large town of Mont-de-Marsan which is at the crossroads of a number of roads both east and west as well as south.

We reached the town at lunchtime and so we looked out for a supermarket to buy our baguette and whatever sweet treats might be on offer for lunch.

We hadn’t factored in the fact that as one heads further south in France the hours of work in a day changes and shops close down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day.

We made it to the entry door for a Carrefour store only to find it locked and a sign saying it closed at 12.30pm.

There was nothing for it but to scratch out a lunch from what we had in our supplies and sweet treats would be off the lunchtime menu today.

The D834 became the D824 and we stopped at the sleepy town of Grenade-sur-l’Ardour in the town square for lunch on a bench where we sat and looked out at the traffic passing through the town.

As we were packing up to get back on the road a jet fighter screamed across the sky so fast we never saw the aeroplane but just heard the noise it made.

The shortest route now took us onto narrow country roads with the first having no centre marked for 15km.Not that it mattered too much because we only past a handful of vehicles in that distance.

Now the scenery going passed the windows was all cultivated farmland and in the distance the end of the flat land stated to look more like mountains with snow on them.

We were nearing our destination of Lourdes and the mountains were of course the Pyrenees, the natural border between France and Spain to the south.

At the village of Latrille we took a stop to look at a map on the side of the road outlining the trails that pilgrims can take to reach Santiago de Compostela.This gave indication that we were now on one of those trails although we didn’t pass any pilgrims today, at least not any on foot!

Heading away from the village a small sign caught our attention ‘Vente,Kiwi’.This made us stop and go back and check as we had never heard of the English word ‘Kiwi’ being used in the French language.

It turned out the sign directed you to a property where kiwifruit were for sale. And sure enough there was a reasonable size plot of kiwifruit vines looking like what some of the vines look like at home in the spring before they are pruned ready for the onset of flowering and a new crop.

We have made some excellent purchasing of 1kg cartons of local French kiwifruit and it has been delicious. Small fruit, sweet and without that hard core we seem to get in the fruit marketed in New Zealand.

Just before we joined the road into Lourdes we encountered ‘Farmer Pierre’, as we have come to call the local farmers blissfully driving their huge farm machines, usually a tractor with some unit being towed behind often carrying the muck from the indoor animal shelters for spreading on the fields.

‘Pierre’ was totally oblivious to any other vehicles bouncing around in the cabin of the tractor travelling at about 30kph.We were happy enough to follow the short distance to the turnoff for us as it was difficult to see past him and if the road was clear to overtake.

However a bus suddenly appeared outside us, horn blaring and in a mood to overtake.

‘Pierre’, surprised by the bus driver’s impatience raised two fingers at the overtaking driver but did at least pull over.

We waited and soon the turnoff took ‘Pierre’ in the other direction and soon we were entering Lourdes, a town at the foot of the Pyrenees made world famous by the reported appearance of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.

She later became Saint Bernadette and the site now attracts 5 million people each year, some of which come to ‘take the waters ‘in the thought that they may be cured from a disability or illness.

Tomorrow we will visit the Our Lady of Lourdes grotto and take in the extensive grounds and Rosary Basilica.

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