One Year Trip: Back in Biarritz and Online!

After a month of a combination of slooowww dial-up internet connection at my house in the countryside and very nice summer weather, which made it hard for me to want to get on the computer; we are now back in Biarritz for the world championship of longboarding under rainy weather and with great internet! so i'm back online! :)

so here's what happened in the last month...
On our first trip to Biarritz, we had great weather during the entire weekend but unfortunately, the ocean was virtually flat during the entire time we were there. A few people still went out in the water, but we didn’t; with water at 12°C (53°F) and a nippy north wind, it just wasn’t worth it!

Bayonne

We enjoyed other things though: walk along the 4-mile beach in Anglet, the salted ham fair and the old town of Bayonne (umm, Bayonne is famous for its deli meats and particularly the salted ham...), a rather amusing surf contest in Biarritz (it can be fun to watch a surf contest when there is hardly a wave, a lot of tactic comes into play… and the drama was complete with a sore looser kid who was throwing his board around and then throwing himself too and rolling on the ground in despair… anyway, I guess loosing can be just as painful even on a flat day! ☺).

Biarritz

It was also very amusing (after the fact) how the host at our b&b told us that we would get lost driving places in town and, unfailingly, we did, almost each time! The streets in the Biarritz-Anglet-Bayonne city conglomerate are never straight so you loose your direction quickly, and the signs half in Basque and half in French are little help!
In the end we had a good time during our little excursion and left our boards at the bed & breakfast for our return in May.

Sea anemones at Biarritz Aquarium

Since our weekend in Biarritz, the weather has been getting warmer each day, and the spring has come in full bloom, along with what seemed like summer for the last two weeks of April! We were in shorts and slippers every day, the trees grew leaves in days, the grass grew, flowers bloomed... very nice!

Buttercups

cherry blossoms

With the mild winter and the early warm spring temperatures, the pests also bloomed: we spotted snakes 5 times already (a first... I must have spotted snakes a total of 10 times in the 10 years that I lived in the countryside year-round before!); caterpillars have wrecked havoc in one kind of tree, making web-like nests and eating all the leaves; and wasps and bees are also in big numbers... so with the good comes some bad too, but still, temperatures hovering around 25°C (77°F) in April is amazing and we can't complain!

So we've been hard at work in the yard planting flowers, doing cuttings, pulling weeds, and growing watermelon... hehehe, we'll see about bearing any fruits though...

We've also been going fishing in the river nearby... no trout yet, but a perch!... it is no Mahi-Mahi but it is something to catch your own fish... well, really, the harder part of fishing is getting the fish off the hook and killing it... and I had no part in that!