On the Way to St. Jean Pied de Port...

The first few days of our journey to the traditional starting point of the Camino Frances have been pretty interesting. Paul and I arrived in Paris yesterday morning and were rushing to catch the TGV (highspeed train) when I realized that I had left the 800 page Victorian novel (Middlemarch) I was intending to read this month on the airport shuttle, leaving me with zero media to entertain myself. Looks like I'm going to be reading some of Paul's Kundera after he gets done with him. The train ride to Bordeaux was impressive; passed brown fallowing fields surrounded by these palmlike trees with green lollipop tops to them, little towns with houses older than America. At Bordeaux we were on time for our train to Lourdes, but after having stepped off for a moment to check whether or not we were in the correct car, the door slammed behind us and did not open again. Stuck in Bordeaux for five more hours than we were initially expecting, we walked around town and grabbed some food and coffee. The city was not as impressive as I was expecting, at least around the train station; brothels and hustling panhandlers abounded. We ate our lunch on the stoop in front of the station and slept for a bit in the sun. The countryside on the train ride gradually became more hilly and green as we chugged further south, giving way to amazing views of the snowcapped French Pyrenees we're going to be hiking through in a day or so. We got off the train in Lourdes at around 9 pm, having gotten on the train in Paris just before 8 am earlier that day. Our first hostel stay was a pleasant one. After dunking ourselves in the healing waters of the famous grotto downtown, we climbed back up the town's steep streets to the station, had breakfast, and got on our train to the trailhead at St. Jean. We're now in Bayonne, an hour or so from the trailhead, catching up with the outside world. The pilgrimage, hopefully, begins tomorrow.