Day 11 - Salies de Bearn to Saint Jean Pied de Port

"I have never met a hill I couldn't walk" they say, well, today I met a hill that almost proved that saying wrong, but I did it. I can do hard things 😉

If you zoom in you can see how hard it was to just push that bike up the hill, and I was barely halfway at that point. That was a very tough hill. Marc was able to ride most if it, good thing for that first gear  It was at about 30 km (see graph below). And then there were a few tough ones at the end of the day as well. 800+ meters over 60kms makes for a tiring day.  We did it. We made it, again today we seemed to skirt the darkest clouds and pretty much avoid the rain that was forecast all day. 

As we left Salies de Bearn this morning we went by the famous salt Coop. The streams that come down from the Pyrenees are extremely salty (10x as salty as the sea) as the water passes through certain salty rocks. They are famous for their salt.  Wow. Cool. 

The bike paths out of town were cool and shady and we had them to ourselves. 

And then we started our climbing. The nice thing about climbing is that you get beautiful views. 

Today was a little "Dr Doolittle" as we encountered some very curious cows. (I love how cows stare at you as you ride by, I always feel like they are really thinking about what they are seeing, like, why do you people ride those bikes all the time?)

And some not interested cows (buts only). 

We had a muskrat (or something similar) join us on the bike path, several cats, some lazy dogs - and one dog that actually came out and barked at us, first one of the trip.  

We sang "ba ba black sheep" of course, to these guys (see the one black sheep hiding in there?)

and we had goats escape their gate in front of us and crowd onto the path. All but one went back under the gate, a bit afraid of us, but the one poor guy got spooked and ran down the path ahead of us for about 40 meters as all the others yelled MEH!!  There was a lot of communication going on. He finally snuck back in, through the barbed wire 😳. I think he got in trouble, the "mehs" sounded like scolding. 

And then on the next turn we met these guys. 

They seemed much larger and more ominous in person, especially their horns, so we got off our bikes and walked by together, slowly, with our bikes between us and them. To be honest, they were basically uninterested. 

Finished the day at Saint Jean le Vieux (very close to Saint Jean Pied au Port). A Bed and Breakfast for a nice change. 

Rode back to town for drinks with the locals and a very delicious dinner, but the rain found us on our ride back from dinner. Somehow after 2 glasses if wine (each) it didn't seem to bother us. 🍷

Cheers to an awesome day to remember!

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Some impressive stats today, if I do say so...