To celebrate Paul’s birthday this year, we took a trip to France to see a stage of the Tour de France. We flew into Toulouse on a Sunday and hired a car to take us into the Hautes-Pyrenees and our apartment for the week in Luz St-Saveur. The plan was to combine seeing the tour with some hiking in the area. Our apartment was excellent – comfortable and in a great location in the village with nice views to the mountains. The village was also a gem as it was very picturesque with great facilities including restaurants, shops and a big market on Monday. It did get very busy as the day of the race approached with lots of cars and campers coming into watch as well as 1000s of cyclists.
The weather was unseasonably hot while – in the 30s for most of the time – and about 10C above the average for the time of year. We adapted our walk distance accordingly and also set out earlier in the day when the temperature was lower. The apartment was cool enough for sleeping and it didn’t really stop us doing the things we wanted to do.
Stage 6 of the tour passed through Luz on Thursday which gave us lots of time to explore and identify the best location to watch the race from. We chose the Pont Napoleon as the riders would be on an uphill stretch so they would be slower going past us. It was a short walk out of the village – driving somewhere that day with all the road closures and traffic would not have been a good plan! We were in position for about 4 hours as we got there to find a good spot to stand, watch the caravan go through and then the race. The atmosphere was really good but was a really warm day – 33C and sunny. The breeze was very welcome as were the few very large drops of rain that came through about the same time as the bikes did! It is exciting to see how fast these guys go even when they’re going up hill. By the time they passed us, the eventual race winner (Tadej Pogacar) had a good minute lead over the other riders with the riders well spread out taking 20 minutes or so to go past us.
My favourite walk was the day we drove to the Pont d’Espagne which was less than an hour’s drive from Luz. The pont was a bridge that used to connect France and Spain via a mule track. We walked in the valley and to a beautiful lake called Lac de Gaube – the colour of the water and the reflections were amazing. There were so many paths around and you could have walked to Spain if you’d had the time and some overnight provisions!
One day we drove out to the Cirque de Gavarnie about half an hour from Luz and walked into the Grand Cascade. It reminded us of walking the Cirque du Fer-a-Cheval in the Alps when we watched le Tour from Samoens a few years ago. It was also where the stage of the tour we watched finished a couple of days later. We also drove up the Col du Tourmalet which featured heavily in the Tour de France. This is a steep mountain road that the cyclists climb up slowly and then descend extremely rapidly! We walked from there to Pic du Midi at 2877 metres with its observatory – and snow!
It was an excellent trip and we both managed to get by okay with the French we’d been learning and agreed that a future trip in a cooler, less busy month would be an excellent idea.
Here are some of the pictures from the trip.
