Some Basque coast........

After spending some delightfully indulgent days at Chateau Valendraud, we again took to the roads and made our way to Biarritz!! It was a reasonable drive this time…though not without its share of OMG moments…we tried to get a little more culture and drifted off the motorway to take some coastal roads and feel more enculturated! This was a great idea ostensibly and we saw a few tiny sweet towns and wandered around Anglet awhile …..eventually drifting into Biarritz the back way and wondering if this was indeed Biarritz?? We drove around a while trying to answer this question when we happened upon a bit of road famous in photos and which we immediately and excitedly recognized!! We’d arrived!! So where to next???

 How to find our Hotel amidst this cacophony of interwoven little lanes and picturesque buildings all going up and down in a hilly, cobbled stoned jumble?  Well….. we ended up going wildly downhill on what seemed to be a one way road but ended up apparently being two lanes and taking ourselves up onto the sidewalk as was only reasonable in order to let another car pass in the opposite direction and then prayed as we did the same on the way back up, needing some divine intervention to make sure that the breaks would hold……more grey hair!! But we found it in the end by some miraculous stroke of luck…tucked inconspicuously away behind a lot of interesting stuff, more adorable buildings, parks with bright flowers and inevitably on a tiny, tiny road!!!

It has however been worth it as all of this near miss adventure seems to be! Mike has surfed the waves of Biarritz…I have frozen my legs in Atlantic cooold water whilst taking pics of him…we have wandered around this absolutely beautiful town by day and night ( can’t decide which is more lovely…) and enjoyed some of the most scrumptious cuisine of the trip…basque food is too good to say no too and every meal just seems to get better and bigger!! It’s a very romantic place and as we walked holding hands up the spiralling paths from the plage to the main street late at night I had to keep pinching myself to make sure it was real.

The undercover market was a pleasure to wander around and we bought some great tepinades and olives to snack on ( like we need snacks )……had an impromptu French/English conversation to an emphatic French man on le Rocher de la Vierge beneath a statue of Mary poised on a rocky cliff top and surrounded by a swirling sea…… took in some Biarritz history at the local musee and cured Michal once and for all of his fear of heights by climbing more never ending stairs and looking out over more remarkable vantage points.