Balcons de L’Ocean at Biscarrosse
///unhurt.washy.stuttering
44°26’55.3128″N, 1°15’14.3460″W

We woke up this morning to the sound of thunder & heavy rain. Fortunately, the storm appeared to be coming to an end – a considerable improvement over the weather forecast from a couple of days ago – with a lot of rain forecast for most of Friday,  Saturday & Sunday but most of the predicted bad weather never appeared.

By the time we had finished our breakfast the rain had pretty much stopped & the sun was fighting its way through the clouds.

We had planned for today to be a quiet one, with no driving – just walking around the village & on the beach.

Before we could get started we discovered that both of our phones had stopped working. The SIM cards we bought were supposed to be active until October 4th – 2 days after we would be home. So we were puzzled by what was going on.

Photo above  – our sim – simtimes they work & simtimes they don’t.

About a week ago Catherine & I each got text messages from the Bouygues Telecom company telling us that our service was about to expire & that we had to call a special number to ensure that our phone service would stay active.

I called Bouygues & the operator told me to ignore the message because we were just short term customers & the message really only applied to pay-as-you-go customers. 

This past Friday Catherine & I each got another message from Bouygues so we just ignored it. Then on Sunday – no phone service. And, of course, Bouygues was closed on Sundays so we couldn’t get any assistance.

For some reason my phone service worked sporadically later in the day. I looked up a nearby location for the phone company & we planned to stop there in the morning to get things sorted out.

Enough phone nonsense for now… back to our Sunday adventures.

After breakfast we went for a walk along the beach. As a result of the storm the surf was much louder & wave periods were much closer than the day before. 

Photo above – surfers are having a good time after the storm.

Photo above  – the tide was out quite a ways when we were walking today & the beach close to the dunes was quite wet in several spots where rainwater from the storm was draining down to the tide line. Lots of interesting patterns in the sand from the runoff.

Photo above  – I don’t think I could ever get tired of looking at the waves & walking on this beach.

Photo above – Catherine dusting the sand off her feet after our walk on the beach.

We had a light lunch & Catherine went for another walk while I stayed in our unit to work on the blog & watch some of the F1 race from Singapore. Shortly after she got back from her walk we got a WhatsApp video call from David & Valerie.

They had finished their walk for the day on the Camino de Santiago in Spain & thought it would be fun to catch up with each other. We enjoyed sharing our adventures.

Photo above  – while we were having our dinner we thought we saw a monster bird fly by. Turned out it was someone in a sailing parachute. There were 3 of them sailing on the air currents & updraft created by the wind blowing up the side of the sand dunes.

These guys were very skilled in handling these things. They could even “park” it & hover over one spot for a couple of minutes. It looked like they were having a good time & they rode the air currents around that part of the beach for almost 2 hours. If I wasn’t so afraid of heights I wouldn’t mind giving it a try myself!

Photo above  – a beautiful sunset – the last one we will see from Biscarrosse.

Photo above  – almost gone!  Reminds me of some of the beautiful sunsets we saw in Goderich on Lake Huron & in St. Andrews on Passamaquoddy Bay.

Tomorrow we drive to Sarlat. About a 3 hour drive from Biscarrosse. We will stop at a Bouygues store in the morning to try & get our phones sorted out.

Cheers!