It’s Sunday, Luchon is a nice place, Le Patio de Luchon is a nice BnB, we have plenty of time, so we decided to stay another night here.
Shortly after 9am we arrived at breakfast and found the long table occupied by four other couples, all French. The conversation was a bit stilted, but we got by. One guy was an engineer working for Airbus in Toulouse. He said Toulouse is a very unusual city because it is built from red bricks. Maybe we’ll go there. We visited Airbus 5 years ago for the tour of the 380 factory but didn’t enter the city then.
There was a bric a brac market next to the church. Anne bought several hand embroidered doilies for the huge sum of €2. The lady said her grandmother did them by hand. All that work, and now they are worth almost nothing.
I bought two small souvenir plates, one of Wales, the other of Glendalough, near Dublin, neither of them made in China. Since we had been in both places on this trip the plates seemed an appropriate way to overfill my suitcase with fragile objects I’ll never look at again when I get home.
I like timepieces of any kind, and couldn’t resist a clock for €2. The German quartz movement is worth more than that. I can throw the clock away if I change my mind about it. I’ve always wanted a clock in the garage with a built-in one hour timer.
Eight years ago at a brocante in Digne les Bains I bought a piccolo trumpet for about the price of 75 clocks. It would sound like the one in the solo in the Beatles “Penny Lane” if I could play it.
In the church was the most beautiful stained glass window I’d ever seen. I tried to photograph it, but as usual it was too bright and dazzled the iphone camera. I got my spectacles quite dark outside and tried photographing through them. It was much better, so I think the principle is good. Some welding shield glass might do nicely, or a dark telescope filter. There are photos on Google of windows taken with iphones. I don’t know how they do it.
We went for a long walk around Luchon. It seems a bit like a French equivalent of Bright, Victoria. Very busy in winter and summer, but not now. The chairlifts were all closed and there wasn’t a lot to do, although many shops and cafes were open. We walked along the river, spent an hour sitting at a cafe adjacent to the airport watching gliders being towed off.
Then a parapente landed, with two people aboard. I decided this was something I had to do, since the weather was brilliant. It was almost 4pm by then. I found a website but it wouldn’t accept a reservation. We walked around to the rendezvous point in Rue Albert Camus on the other side of the airport. There were a few people there, lying on the grass, apparently waiting. Anne selected all the brochures, four of them. I called four numbers and heard four recordings. Since one parapente had landed, at least one company was flying today.
The idea is that you launch from a hilltop 600m above the airport and fly for the time you select and pay for, over an area ranging to the Spanish border a few km away, then land at the airport. It looked great. Anne was OK with the idea, since my life insurance is fully paid up. We waited for a while and were at the point of giving up, since nothing seemed to be happening. Then two more parapentes landed. I approached both pilots, but there were no vacancies for today. The weather didn’t look too good for tomorrow. Then we recognised the second passenger as one of the people at breakfast this morning at Le Patio de Luchon. She had booked as far back as June. It looks as if booking a flight is really a bit of a lottery. You are invited to fly if it’s your turn when they decide to fly. I plan to be in France next September, maybe I’ll remember to book in June.
Anne and I spent well over an hour in the laundrette across the road from our BnB, me wearing Anne’s stretchy black jeans so I could wash both of mine. Then a lateish dinner around the corner. The couple at the next table were slightly younger than us, from Munich, and had cycled from Nice, right across France, so far this holiday. They had fluent French as their 3rd language. It put us deeply to shame, as we have about 1.1 languages. The waitress (perhaps manager) would not allow me to use the iphone to pay. She completely dismissed the idea of using a phone to pay the bill. She wouldn’t even consider letting me try it, so I had to sign. We decided she was very un-French, in a nice sort of way, perhaps Italian or Spanish.
No photos, wiffee here is too bad, even cellular won’t work tonight. Better now, in Ax le Thermes on Monday, but not much.