Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Dax - 3rd June

We are adjusting well to ‘Basque’ time, go to bed late, get up late, venture out on small missions and return home between events for two hour siestas.

The plan was to take in two markets and then take a drive out of town. However the first market in Bayonne was so good we stayed for lunch...
Cheese Experience No.43 - Three Cheese Galette. The vendor does exceptionally well and consistently had a queue waiting. He rolled out pizza dough, placed shredded mozzarella, feta and halloumi on half, and then folded it in over tucking in the open edges. The galette is put on an upside down wok (or something similar) to cook. After consuming onsite, unlike the French who would take it home and reheat it, we then bought bread and some delicious plump cherries.

Further market entertainment, some masters having their own little race in cutter size boats.

After our siesta the next event was a festival of arts I found on the local website, the disconcerting part was it listed our address or car park as where the event was being held.

We went down for a look and from 11.00am to 9.00pm they are welcoming new immigrants to the region, not us and luckily not in our car park, but next door. We arrived at karaoke time which led to the afternoon’s main event, a lady singing in English and French anything from ABBA to Tina Turner.
We went home for another siesta in order to sit out the heat before going for a drive to Dax.

The photos below are not of the festival, but of two special features in our current house; it was hard to choose just two because there are so many. The tap is a light fitting and the toilet, well yes, it is pink, doubles as a library and cleaning cupboard, and could do with a tap light fitting. You can’t tell from this photo but it is just hanging from its wires.

Dax is a thermal spa town, north-eastish from Bayonne and has a hot water fountain in the middle of town. I did the normal tourist thing and touched the water and it was definitely hot.

Dax also has Roman ruins in the form of a Gallo-Roman wall, once 4 metres thick, and 1.4km long with 46 watch towers.

As with a lot of the Basque area they are rugby mad, their team is known as ‘Culs Rouge’ = red butts, players are loyal to the club colours down to their rear ends, or so the slogan says. The rugby season finished in May so the Dax residents are getting excited about stage 4 of the Tour de France starting there on July 4th.

The town also boasts having a giant kiwifruit statue. We couldn’t find it, but did find one small area of kiwifruit vines on the drive home

We arrived back home, had another siesta and then went back to the neighbourhood festival, this time they were doing African dances, one of the party goers literally believed the festival was in our car park and nicked our parking space while we were out.

Last photo of the day is Bayonne’s memorial to the war dead, they just have to get that bull in the scene somewhere.