Lourdes

From a religious festival to one of the most religious places, some may have thought we were on a pilgrimage ourselves. We had already seen the Pope and tonnes of churches. Our arrival in Lourdes was met with some of the heaviest rain we had seen since Turkey, so plans had to change. We got a cheap room and had to forgo the campsite, but proceeded to sleep for the next 14 hours. It is dificult to beat a good sleep, and that was a great sleep.

The blue sky to which we had become accustomed woke us up the next day and we started our own little pilgrimage around Lourdes. This year is the 150 year anniversariy of the apparitions of Our Lady to Saint Bernadette, so the town was decked out and they have placed a trail around town for you to follow important places in Bernadette´s life. The fountain she was baptised in, her house, the cave where the apparitions occurred and the oratory where she recieved her first communion.

We jumped on board the trail, but what we were struck by was the number of elderly and ill that were also on the trail. Many were in trollies being pulled around by nurses, friends, family, or Scouts. Most the sights are unimpressive except for the Grotto, which has a massive church built above it, and has thousands of candles that have been left burning as offerings.

Every day they have a procession of the pilgrimages and a torchlight procession, which ends up in the Church of St Pious X, a massive underground church that can hold up to 25,000. No, the ´0´ key has not got stuck. It was huge!!!

There is also a fountain where you can fill your container with water from the grotto. It tastes nice, but we did come down with a cold a couple of days later, so we can´t vouch for its healing powers.

The next day the Tour de France pulled into town. After a fair amount of time scoping out just the right posy, just after a corner so they have slowed down, with a long view afterwards, we staked our claim, pulled out cushion and waited two hours for the caravan to arrive.

The caravan is all the sponsors of the Tour, who dress up their cars and throw free stuff to the crowd. We were in the mood for some free stuff and our position did us well. We walked away with: three hats, a bag, 2 bottles of water, 2 packets of lollies, a packet of salami, 2 keyrings, a lanyard, a sunglasses cleaner thing, a couple of french newspapers, and some blowhorns. Most of which was swapped out for an impressive Skoda hat which has the date and stage on it. Well worth the trade.

We then sat and waited for another hour for the cyclists to come through and then twenty seconds after that we went home... All and all a nice day in the sun. The locals gave something to watch and we have a nice selection of hats.



That day happened to be Bastille Day and the town was putting on a pyro-symphony, that is, fireworks to music. Now we are becoming quite the connoisseur of fireworks and this was the first time in Europe that they had played music with the big booms, which was nice as it had come up on our score sheets a couple of times. It was one of the best displays we have seen!!

After a hard day of sitting around watching things, it was off to sleep to get up early for our train to Bordeaux.