Renovation project - Floods in the Pyrenees

Renovation project - Floods in the Pyrenees

We wake and go for breakfast and realise that you can see the Pyrenees from the terrace where we are eating, they are so beautiful, but surprisingly still very snow capped! A little bit worrying as we will be driving over them very soon.

The breakfast is a buffet breakfast, but a word of warning, a  French buffet breakfast is not the same as a UK buffet, there is a choice of bread or croissant, tea or coffee, Yoghurt and cereal, do not expect more than this if you are having a French buffet breakfast, this is what the majority of them are like, sometimes there is fresh fruit, but not always, this morning I really felt like something substantial to eat, maybe because we didn’t really eat last night and today we will be travelling again

We are only an hour and a half from Laruns so we stop for diesel ( I still don't trust the petrol gage so want the tank full at all times) the town near the horror movie motel is called Aire Sur l’Adour and  is really pretty, we park by the river, this is amazing, I have never seen such a full and fast flowing river, you cannot see where the banks were originally, but I'm hoping the rain and floods we saw on the TV last night are not on this side of the Pyrenees (20/06/13)

Once we have had a walk round we head off again, we drive through a city called Pau and as we cross a river notice how swollen it is again, we stop and see some of the devastation caused by the floods, there are 30 and 40 foot trees that have been ripped up and are stuck under the bridge, you really can't begin to understand the strength and force of nature until you see firsthand the devastation that it can cause, these photo's do not do it any justice and we don't think Pau has been hit that hard.

 

We drive to Laruns to find the hotel, the sat nav takes us to a small drive which has only 2 houses on it, I am sure that one of these is the hotel, but as it doesn't open to guests until 4pm we decide to sit and have a coffee on the town square, this town is so pretty and you really can taste the difference in the air, it is so clean and sharp and fresh, I just wish I could bottle some mountain air and take it back to family in the UK.

The town is like a picture postcard of how you imagine a mountain village to look, there is a small church and all of the houses have steep sloping roofs and snow boards on them (I have since learnt these are to stop the snow from sliding of the roof), I really get the urge to start singing doh ray me or the hills are alive from the film sound of music!!!!

We eventually ask some locals if they know the Hotel we are looking for and it wasn’t one of the 2 houses I had been looking at, it was actually on the main road and very easy to find.

The hotel is very different to last night’s hotel and we have a couple of nights booked here, the room is how I want our B&B to look, very simple and elegant. But the best bit is the windows they are similar to the windows that we have been having problems with and now we know how to fix the dilemma with the shutters, it is so simple, we can just attach wooden shutters to the window panes themselves, I do not know why we didn’t think of this before

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