Bayonne, Biarritz, Saint Jean de Luz, and back to San Sebastián

Signing up for a Small Group Tour can be a mixed blessing - but they certainly get one to places that would be impossible to navigate on one's own, even with a rental car (I mean - I would have spent all the time seeking out impossible-to-find parking spaces).  So back to France for the day - which was fun.  Bayonne is a really lovely town - I'd go back there like a shot (and it's just come second in some most-livable-town-in-France context, after Annecy - which I well understand, even if my strongest memory of Annecy involves min-baguettes - ficelles? - with bacon in them).  And the cathedral!  Stunning.  I could have spent three times as long there than we did, but one of my two business-man fellow travelers (the guy from Singapore - not the Filipino-from-Dallas) was much more interested in heading off and buying slices of ham.   But ... it is just like the St Pancras Station hotel!  A bit more religious, ok, but the arches and color scheme had me googling "Gilbert Scott Bayonne" - albeit without finding anything ...

Emerging from the cathedral into the town ...

lots of timber framed houses.

And then onto Biarritz - photos of royal palace and the Grand Plage etc turned out fairly boring, and we were moving along at a fairly rapid pace, but I did like the old fishing village block (doubtless carefully curated, but the fish restaurants down there looked good),

and the view looking south along the coast was pretty stunning.

Then down the coast to Saint Jean de Luz, which is where Louis XIV was married - that I did not know (indeed, from Osborne House to Zaragoza to here, my sense of the interconnectedness of European royalty over the centuries has got much deeper, or maybe more confused).  The church is particularly notable not just for its very maritime hanging boat;

but for the three tiers of wooden balconies (apparently this is where the men would be on important church holidays, with the women down in the nave).  I could have spent longer there, but the guys were off to the sardine shop and the foie gras shop ... (well, ok, I did buy a whole hunk of rather good very sharp hard sheep's cheese at the cheese shop, myself ... hoping I can smuggle most of it back into England ...).

Ristras!  I've never seen them anywhere outside of New Mexico!

And some fun bits of town architecture.  The beach, again, was hugely busy - it's school holiday time; we're coming up to the July 14th holiday, and for all I know people were celebrating the election ...

and then I had dinner back at the hotel, in the rooftop bar.  You see all those specks in the sky?  Those are swirling seagulls.  One had the audacity to hover and flap and think about stealing my tuna tartare on roast aubergine (and yes, that was as good as it sounds) - but I wouldn't let it.