Six Days in France: Overnight to Biarritz

I took the sleeper to Biarritz. You can fly there from the UK, but the flights are in the middle of the day in both directions, so you lose two days messing around airports. Take the sleeper and you get two full days back.

SNCF's idea of a "First Class" sleeper compartment is pretty basic: four bunks, thin mattresses and foam pillows, and if you're lucky the water works in the little toilettes at both ends of the carriage. If you're lucky. I shared the sleeper compartment with a young lady Korean student and two early thirty-something Frenchmen: a BCBG investment banker based in London and a supplier manager for a company whose business I didn't catch but was based in Biarritz with suppliers in Poland (not a thinkable sentence in 1970). We chatted politely for a short while and then got on with the serious business of trying to get to sleep. It takes a while, and I find I woke up when the train stopped rather than when it was running. The Korean student barely got off fast enough at Bayonne, and what felt like a split second later, it was our turn to tumble off at Biarritz. 07:00 in the morning. I had a quick coffee and croissant in the station buffet, where the barman suggested I take the A1 bus into town. I explained to the driver where I was going and he told me the name of the stop I needed. Don't even think about walking from the station into the town: it's steep uphill all the way and a lot further than it looks on the map. The hotel let me in, at the unearthly and still dark of 07:25 and I had breakfast on the patio as dawn broke. My chosen table is right in front of the camera. This was my breakfast view all week.

This is the road to the "Cote des Basques" in the signpost. It's shorter than the walk across my local Cineworld on the way to the station every morning. That's right. In half the time it takes me to walk from the car to the station, I could walk from the hotel to a Biarritz beach. Or in the other direction, I could be down in the town centre. You see, heaven does exist. Just not in the Middlesex suburbs. The beaches are for another post.