Porto-Hendaye-Bordeaux-Paris Day 26 and Day 27

April 25-26, 2010

Day 26 and Day 27 Porto-Hendaye-Bordeaux-Paris

Today was spent relaxing mostly.  After saying good-bye to our fuzzy friends and checking out of the hotel, we had a wonderfully filling breakfast for super cheap again, although not as cheap as the day before.  After that we went on a hunt for stamps.  I thought it would be like the last countries where the tobacco shops or other type of stands would sell them.  I don't know if they did because someone told us about some post office that was open Sundays and holidays, so we headed there instead.  Turned out that on the outside of the post office was an automatic stamp dispenser.  It was cool (the smallest things amuse me).  So I bought my stamps from the dispenser, sent my postcards and then we were off to the park in front of the city hall where Trevor and I both read for about an hour and a half.  I guess it was more like a square with a few chairs under a few trees, but it was very pleasant none-the-less.  After, we headed down to the water after walking through some backstreets and climbing down a bunch of stairs.  The views were very nice and the weather was especially warm.  According to some of the signs around, it was about 25 degrees!  We then went in search of a grocery store, bought a bunch of food and headed for the train station.  We had 2 trains to catch today.  Once was a 5 min train to the other train station in town and then we caught our 12 hour train ride to Hendaye.  The train ride was uneventful.  The sleep wasn't great, but at least we saved ourselves a hotel night!  Once in Hendaye, we went to check if we could get to Paris by today.   We could get to Paris, it would just be at 21:00.  We figured that was good enough for us, so we bought the tickets.  We talked with some people in the line after who were also going to Paris and they had managed to get tickets to get to Paris earlier, but we decided to stick with our tickets.  We ended up having a delay once we got to Bordeaux, where I spent most of my time reading.  Trevor went grocery shopping and tried to find power for his laptop.  And finally after a ridiculous amount of time spent in trains, we got to Paris.  Next difficulty: finding a hotel.  Because of the uncertainty of making it to Paris by today, we hadn't booked anything, but Trevor had sort of picked out an area that was cheaper and we headed there (Voltaire metro stop).  We found the hotel that Trevor had been looking into and after attempting to speak French and ending up having some guy translate for us, we managed to get a room for cheaper than originally mentioned (even though you had to "rent" sheets!).  Unfortunately, I can't say it was a nice hotel, but it was a place to sleep.  There was suppose to be internet, but it wasn't connecting and the lady didn't want Trevor touching the connection, so tonight we couldn't do anything on the computer.  Later I heard the people in the next room swearing about how stupid the lady was.  Oh well.  It was time to rest before the insanity of Paris.