oil be glad to get outta here

France

Even Bacchus rests
Sometimes, when wine is gone and
Time is short. Even he.

Except that we don't rest. We have to get to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port (the beginning point of the Camino de Santiago) and on to Pamplona in time for the Festival de San Fermín and to meet my sister!

We endeavoured to set out early, but it didn't really happen due to some strugglings with the fact that it's Sunday and food is hard to find, and also some directional mishaps related to the terrible tourist map of Bordeaux we were given at the tourism office. Anyway, we finally managed to get out of Bordeaux to the south. It's all green on the map, so we figured it would be something like the relaxing forest path we found outside Royan.

Well, it is something like that, but not quite the same. This area is huge, and it's been extensively logged. Looking around, it's obvious that almost all the trees you can see are replants of some older trees that once stood there. We found some bare areas that covered acres and acres and were filled with stacks of lumber. It all comes from somewhere..

We also happened across an oil well (there's a video on our YouTube channel, haha), which Evan was excited about because he'd never seen one in person before. I guess that growing up in Texas exposes a girl to that kind of stuff.

The towns that we passed through in this expansive semi-forest seemed largely accidental: small bursts of minimalist civilization required by the logging operations happening. They also seemed largely closed, which was unfortunate for a pair of hungry and thirsty travellers. We found a hotel that was open, though, near the end of the day when the heat was murder and our water was nearly gone, whose bartender happily filled our bottles to the brim with icy cold liquid. Mmmmm... H2O. My best friend. :D

I also got a call from my family today! I guess my sister is back from her cruise in Virginia, and she's training and getting her bike ready to come out on the trip. My parents were on the phone, too, so we had a nice family chat. :)

Tonight we're staying in a town called Ychoux. We had a grand old time exhausting all the puns we could think of with that name (if they had a mountain here, they could call it "Peak Ychoux"!, sneeze which sounds like "Ychoux", first Ychoux, then Yswallow!, etc.), but it's a nice enough town. We're staying at a campsite run by a cyclist who apparently took a trip from Paris to Porto (in Portugal) some years ago, so he's excited about our trip. Hurray!