I checked our bank balance to see if there is any money left. Payday is this Friday. I noticed that Sunday’s trip to Bordeaux Airport had cost $113, and displayed the trip in the Uber app. When I arranged the trip, the app had quoted €32.78. I arranged the same trip in the app for next Sunday morning, €32.78, then cancelled it. I went through the complaint procedure in the app, and within 2 minutes received a reply from a human (he passed the Turing test) saying that he had checked, the driver had not used the optimum route, and reduced the charge to €48, which I thought was reasonable. Maybe Rajaa wasn’t actually human.
This leaves me quite impressed overall with Uber. I’m not sure I should be, but I can’t see myself using cabs again. The other thing I Iearned is that the exchange rate is 0.59. I had been working with 0.62, so 8/5 from € to $A. But the credit card rate makes it closer to 10/6, gulp! It was 10/7 last year.
Our car parking was paid up until 4pm. We planned to take the ferry out to Santa Clara Island, perhaps have lunch there, then drive to Cauterets, about 250km away in the western Pyrenees.
If the island is just the closest land we can see from the ferry ticket office, then we don’t need to go there. Instead, we walked the length of La Concha Beach.
I just couldn’t capture with the iphone what I was seeing here, couldn’t combine panorama with zoom. It wasn’t distant, as it looks here, it was right there in front of you. Maybe if the iphone had a 50mm lens.
I picked up a very dangerous glass bottle fragment. Anne suggested that if everyone picked up one piece of litter then the beach would be clean. It was actually pretty good as is. Anne passed on the dead fish.
By now it was about noon, and we returned to the underground carpark and were sure to program Camilla (her Spanish name) for our hotel in Cauterets, before we even backed out of the parking spot. The machine wanted €50 to raise the boom, but our €37.50 prepaid hotel voucher worked. A good deal.
Back into France. The best thing about a GPS is getting out of a city in the right direction. Two stops for tolls, seemingly in as many kilometres. I’m not sure we can afford to travel on the Peage. At the next stop we took a ticket. Effortless cruise on the A64 along the base of the Pyrenees, very little traffic. We passed another car with red plates, a fellow foreign tourist. We turned right near Pau for Lourdes and at the exit toll gate I chose the wrong lane. Cards only, no cash. Oh, no! Foreign cards usually don’t work in toll gates and parking lots. The machine wanted €11.40 but rejected my debit card, in polite French. While the cars queued up behind us, Anne suggested trying the credit card. Look, the boom’s up! It worked!
We reached the Hotel du Lion d’Or at 12 Rue Richelieu, Cauterets at about 3pm, just as the rain started pouring. My expensive new brolly came in handy getting the suitcases from the car in the free Place de la Liberte carpark to the hotel 300m away.
We have tried to avoid revisiting places, since the original magic usually fades on a second visit. San Sebastian and Cauterets are exceptions. We loved the Hotel du Lion d’Or five years ago, and Cauterets is surpassingly beautiful. On both previous visits to the region, in late Spring, we have not been able to see the Cirque de Gavarnie, in the heights near the Spanish border. Perhaps we’ll do better in Autumn.
The hotel gave us a suite. Before I even retrieved the suitcases I booked a second night. The hotel is a bit expensive, almost as expensive as the jail cell in San Sebastian, but we’re on holiday.
Five years ago the meal in the hotel restaurant had been truly exceptional. The hotel is still run by the same family, and they didn’t disappoint. They introduced us to Creme de Mure back then. Anne recalled that I called it “the nectar of the gods”. So we ordered Murancon. It was an aperitif, but we had it at the end (we’re not sophisticated). It was delicious, seemed like a dessert wine, but it wasn’t what we had 5 years ago. We have another chance tomorrow evening to get it right.