Driving from Gorge de Verdon to the Pyrenees

We had a long drive from the Gorge de Verdon to the Pyrenees - most of the way from one side of southern France to the other.  We actually broke it up and stayed one night in Carcassonne, a well-preserved fortified medieval town.

But first - one last photo of the Gorge de Verdon, seen from a road far up the canyon wall. Actually, I must confess, I risked my life for this one.  I had to climb over the wall on the side of the road and stand on a somewhat slippery downward slope at the top of a very tall cliff to get this one.  The darn trees were in the way otherwise.  Had to wait for the clouds to open up and let some sunlight down onto the cliff faces and the river.  Lake Saint Croix is hidden by the ridge on the right.  We kayaked from the lake up to that big sand bank in the river.

We arrived into Carcassonne in the late afternoon.  We were staying at the Best Western, which is much nicer than it sounds.  It's right in the center of the medieval city, in a historic building with a beautiful courtyard garden.  The weird thing is, you can't drive there at all - so you end up giving your bags to a stranger, while you park your car in a far lot and walk back, hoping your bags will arrive at your room eventually.  They said a half hour, but it was more like two hours before we got them, during which Jennifer started to wonder if she needed to buy a new wardrobe and get new contacts.  Carcassonne is bursting at the seams with tourists during the day, which is why it's nice to stay inside the town overnight.  After dinner, we wandered around the quiet, deserted streets.

On our way into the Pyrenees, we passed field after field of sunflowers, or tournesol in French.  I assume the word evolved from the phrase "turn toward the sun", as the flowers do.

We were on our way to the Cirque de Gavarnie, a huge valley with an amazing waterfall that is certainly the most famous hike in the French Pyrenees, if not in all the Pyrenees.  To get there, we had to drive through one of the most incredible mountain passes used by the Tour de France.  The "Col du Tourmalet" is at the top of very long and steep winding road, and there were bikers, alone and in small groups, all along the road, pushing up the mountain for hours.  

This is the view of the pass from a little ways up a hiking trail that leaves from there.  It looks like we're standing on the edge of a volcano.  The whole time we were there, I kept thinking I'd better hurry up and get the shot before these clouds move in and cover the mountain.  A half hour later, it still looked like this.  For scale, notice the two people standing to the side looking down. 

I was mesmerized.  These clouds rush up against this windy barrier and curl up and back on themselves, never breaking through.  Here's another view zoomed back a bit.  We were thinking this was really unusual until we got to our hotel in Gavarnie a few hours later.  When we told the woman at the desk about passing through Col du Tourmalet, the first thing she said was "Were the clouds all on one side and not the other?"  She said it's often like this. There's a speck that's a person in the lower left of this photo as well.

We passed this lovely mountain stream running alongside the mountain road crawling up to the town we'd stay in for the next few nights.

A second photo of the same stream.  I added this photo in long after this was first posted, so most people missed it.  Oh well!

We'd arrived in Gavarnie, and it was as impressive as we could have hoped.  The view from our hotel window as the sun sank into the west and the clouds moved in.

The next day, we'd do La Breche de Roland hike, and the Cirque de Gavarnie hike the day after that. 
This is the third in a series on our southern France summer vacation.  The first was about the Martel hike in the Gorge de Verdon.  The second was about kayaking in the Gorge de Verdon, and hiking the Styx trail there. 

Kayaking on the Gorge de Verdon

It was nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit when we visited the Gorge de Verdon, so kayaking was on the agenda as one way to escape the heat.  We ended up kayaking twice, and also doing a hike down along the river.  Here's a preview for the benefit of certain social media sites that automatically grab the first picture in the post to show on their site.

We showed up around 10 AM one morning to rent a kayak at Lake Saint Croix, which is formed from a damn of the Verdon river coming out of the gorge.  When we got there, we found out that most everyone who goes to Verdon does the exact trip we wanted to do.  This was the line to rent any type of water conveyance.  After waiting in line for 45 minutes or so, the line stopped - there were no boats left!  So, then the line went really slowly because we had to wait for people to return boats.  Luckily, they have a two-hour maximum rental, so people started returning boats pretty soon after. The gorge starts just past the bridge seen at the left of the photo.

So, we had to wait.  The line was no shorter by the time we got our kayak.

This was the most crowded kayaking we've ever done.  It doesn't help that everyone is going up the same, narrow gorge together.  The walls of the gorge were leaning away from the river at this point, so the scenery was not that dramatic.  Here's what it looked like at the far end of the kayaking, where they had a rope across the river with signs saying go no further.

Since it was so hot, we really wanted to kayak another day.  Jennifer found us another place to go kayaking.  It was an hour drive from the popular part of the lake, but we both liked it a lot better.  One nice part about it is that there was no wait at all.  It wasn't much less crowded, and the scenery was not as good at the beginning of this trip.  But the scenery was a lot better at the far end of this trip.  For scale, notice the bright yellow kayak in the center bottom of this one.

This was cool.  There was water streaming down through these plants and moss and dripping into the river here. The moss was a lush deep green.  The sound of the dripping water was soothing. 

My favorite spot was a cave just big enough to kayak into, with water dripping from the outer rim down into the river.  It was a little like going behind a curtain of water.

We only had this spot to ourselves for a minute or so.  Lots of other kayakers had been there just before, and then more showed up.  But it was really cool for that brief moment to get to be there with no one else around.

We also did the Styx hike, which goes along the riverbanks for a long while.  It was cloudy that day, with a little soft rain every once in a while.  There weren't many people there, so we were alone on the trail most of the time, with others passing by every once in a while.  The riverbed was full of massive white boulders fringed with dark green moss and lichen.  The river water was just as aquamarine here as it was everywhere else.

We stopped to eat our lunch at this spot.  The water was really clear.  This was one of the larger, calmer pools along the way.  This fish, about a foot long, gray with dark spots, swam back and forth lazily in front of us as we ate our bread, cheese, and prosciutto lunch seated on a nearby rock.

This was taken from a footbridge, high over the river.  The bridge was pretty shaky.  Some people jumped around to make it sway when they walked on it. 

The gray and orange walls of the canyon, bright green trees, white rocks, and aquamarine river water made the whole hike really enjoyable, even if we did get a little rain.  

This was the second article on our hot August road trip across southern France and into the Pyrenees. The first article was on the famous 9.3-mile Martel hike.  The next article is about all the cool stuff we saw on the drive between Gorge de Verdon and the Cirque de Gavarnie, in the Pyrenees, on the border with Spain.