Geothermal springs
For health! Not for the young nor
For the well. Gah! Argh!
So we hung out in Dax for a day today, getting our bikes ready to go do the crazy mountain crossing and letting our legs have a rest before we ask so much of them. I did some surgery on Evan's handlebar bag (it's now held on with some zip ties and the cords from the toe baskets on my original pedals) and spend some time reorganising our new equipment (we bought a new pot! It replaces the old one that we coated with cheese during the pizza experiment in Bordeaux) and washing clothes and swimming in the pool at our campsite and all that good stuff.
Oh, swimming was sort of strange. I discovered that my body is now programmed for cycling, which unfortunately makes it very difficult to swim underwater. As soon as I start pumping my legs, my lungs decide that they have to give all their oxygen down there, so I'm basically pathetic at that now. Sigh.
I'm pretty excited that we'll be leaving France soon, although I'm going to miss singing about Monsieur Bricolage. Monsieur Bricolage ("Mr. Construction") is a shop that's found in a lot of places around here that purveys hardware and the like, but for some reason Evan and I have decided that he is the only reasonable French person and that he secretly builds bike paths and shopping markets and things to help us out when we're stuck. We sing his name as the only lyrics to lots of tunes that we know, but our favourite to sing it to is the wakeup song on our phone alarm (it's Samsung's "Get Happy", if you can find it). Anyway, that's about all I'll miss about France. Oh, and maybe the delicious pastries. :D
We tried to go to some hot baths today for our day off (a number of "Thermes" are listed on our map of Dax), but we were told that the hot springs are only for people with medical issues and would we please go play in the pool? We were... angry. But it was a nice pool, I guess...
Anyhow, another day in Dax! Tomorrow, we set out for the head of the Camino de Santiago! I read up on it some, and the terminus (Santiago de Compostela, Spain) is the third holiest city for Catholics (after the Vatican and Jerusalem) because remains which are presumed to belong to Saint James were found there. Of course, no one can prove that it was him, but the faithful make a pilgrimage to Spain to see it, anyway. There are a lot of paths that go there (beginning as far away as Sweden!), but the path we will be starting at St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port is the head of the best-known section of the caminos.