Green Hills of Spain 13-27 June St. Jean de Luz and Home

We are right on the Spanish French border staying for two nights in a nice little friendly, family run hotel with a lovely shady garden.

The hotel was made famous by Pierre Loti a French novelist and naval officer who stayed here while he was writing some of his books, it is said he was very keen on pelota which is still played on the land in front of the hotel.

To get here we had a rather interesting journey from Bilbao spending 3½ hours on the Euskotren railway, the nearest thing I can compare it to is the Docklands Light Railway in London stopping at over 30 stations. Thankfully our bags were traveling separately.

Looking from our bedroom window we could see the top of La Rhune, this is a 905 Mt high mountain in the Pyrenees, the France, Spain border runs right through the summit so its suggested this was at one time a smuggling route. We were to have a     
trip to the summit on the La Rhune rack railway, as the name suggest due to the steep incline, traction is via a third rack rail and a cog on the train. Interestingly the trains are electrically powered with a 3 phase supply, two via the overhead catenaries and the third via the rails. They run 4  trains, two in each direction following each other by a few yard so that all four can be accommodated in the single passing loop.

The track is only 2.6 miles long  but the train only travels at 5.6 MPH and they have to wait in the passing loop, its not a fast trip. 

On our return from the train our coach took us to visited St. Jean de Luz for an afternoon of leisure

  
We also had time to have a wander around Ascain, right next to our hotel was the church, this had very few windows so was quite dark inside, it also had balconies around the walls.  We all took a walk along the river where we came across a rather strange orange building behind locked gates and a high fence

The last morning of our holiday and a coach picked us up from the hotel to take us to the railway station where we caught the TVG back to Paris Montparnasse where a coach was waiting to take us back across the city to Gare du Nord. The French police were out in force not only at the station but also the surrounding area. When we arrived at Gare du Nord there was mayhem for the Eurostar terminal, trains were being cancelled and others running very late, hundreds of people trying to cheque in, The queues for the check in ran all the way down from the check in terminals down the stairs to the main level then down the stairs to the basement where they were using all the available space to corral people to feed up the stairs. The end result was we just got to departures as they called our train and arrived over an hour late at St Pancras. Thankfully unlike some we didn’t have an onward journey, only the underground to take us to out hotel near Victoria Station.