Cali-Parisien

Memorial Pentecost Day Weekend

Memorial Day, and we are one of the few back at work instead of at the beach. Not just because there's no beach here in Paris (except in August), but because, well, it's not a holiday.

But nevertheless despite these slight technicalities, we were fortunate to have three holiday weekends in May and so we were eager to take advantage of the extra time off to travel to some parts of France that we hadn't explored.

The first weekend, we decided to visit the South-West corner of France and go hiking in the Pyrénées mountains. So we took the TGV train and bus to the small town of Cauterets in the base of the Pyrénées. Basically from there, we set out on foot into the various hiking trails to start our adventure (photos).

And as is custom here in France, any mention of the Pyrénées is usually followed by a story about the brown bears resident there (I can't think of a single person that didn't bring up the bears after mention of our plans to go there). The reason is that they were nearly killed and hunted to extinction in 1990, but the European governments, despite protests from very active locals and farmers, have been steadily trying to increase their numbers. So we are constantly hearing in the news about another bear released or another bear found poisoned. Unfortunately though (or perhaps fortunately) despite how hard we searched, we didn't see any bears, just lots and lots of these guys.

Then again later in the month, for what might have been Memorial Day weekend back in the US, we decided to go in the opposite direction to the North-West tip of France, Bretagne (Brittany). Like our last adventure, we took the train North-West to Rennes and from there rented a car to drive along the beautiful coast, stopping at various sights (and taking photos) along the way.

posted by geek @ lundi, mai 29, 2006 3 comments