48 - Landes-lubber - Vielle Saint Girons & Leon

 Sunday, 4 February 2024

I had three objectives in mind for today and one of those was dropped early in the morning.  

1. My colleague from Newark would be arriving today to tag out with me for supporting the project in Castets.  I wanted to be close by and help her get familiar with Dax and the area.
2. I wanted to spend a bit of time seeing stuff in the Landes region, since I'd already said "so long" to the Basque region to the south.
3. Begin the packing process since I might not have too much time on the weeknights

A text message from my coworker indicating that she was too tired from the overnight flight to do anything but to have lunch at the hotel and decompress in the her room crossed objective #1 off the to-do list.  Hopefully she sleeps through the night and won't have an issue making it to the office tomorrow morning.  

That freed me up to tackle the fairly conservative idea I had for the day.  One of my housing options for this visit was a company owned house in Vielle Saint Girons and I figured it'd be a relatively short activity to go see what could have been: it's a small town and also is known to have a fairly untamed beach.  A drive through town confirmed that it is indeed small and I made my way onwards to the beach town part of VSG about 5 minutes away.  

The weather was fairly uncooperative today, it stayed misty and cloudy but I suppose it helped to drive home just how fortunate I've been this trip to have clear sunny weather for so many of my sight-seeing days.  So while the roar of the ocean was impressive, the fog obstructed the view in such a way to make it mysterious.  Add on top of that the abandoned state of the beach town for the winter season and I had an interesting thriller-movie walk on the beach.

The mysterious surfer emerging from the haze

The other people on the beach quickly disappeared from view when I started walking along the water

If you put your ear to it while standing on the beach, you can hear the ocean 😂

Just on the other side of the sand dune lay some forest fortifying beach front.

I don't know if anybody told the sand that it's not supposed to hang around on the heli-pad

I wonder if they sweep away the sand in town for the summer season

The beach of VSG felt like a ghost town today, both from having at most two other people but also from the wispy mist

After the beach, I made my way to lunch by picking a nearby restaurant practically at random (but filtering out those that weren't open).  That's how I made my way to La Ferme d'Huchet.  Enroute from the beach to the restaurant, I drove right past my company's site in VSG and noticed the change in sulfur in the air when I finally came down wind of the plant.  It's not necessarily a *bad* smell but it's certainly a smell.  Fortunately, I didn't have to reflect on how I perceived it because the odor was quickly overpowered in the restaurant with delicious aromas.   

This restaurant stands out in my memory for having a cat roaming the dining area.  Moon was a very polite cat, doing her rounds of the tables and then returning to a quiet corner.

I didn't have to search the menu for long, the plat du jour was a cassoulet with pan-fried foie gras on top.  Perfection.  This cassoulet was sweeter than the one I had in Carcassone, probably from the carrot and tomato in the recipe.  

Moon coming by to check if everything was to my liking.

I didn't catch the dog's name, but it was waiting outside as I was leaving.  

While dining, I'd noticed a flowering trees in the window; so I stopped by to check it out more closely after the meal. 

A Google lens search indicates it to be an acacia? 

The dog came to investigate my inspection of the tree and even let me toss their pinecone.

Since I wasn't yet ready to return home and start the packing process, I made one more stop in the small town of Leon.  This little village features a lake which I took a short walk along.  With the mist, it was quite calming on the lake: I could still smell the occasional waft from the plant but the air was filled with the calls of birds.  

I imagine this lake could be quite popular in the summer season.

Out that way was a nature center which indicated that the river exiting this lake snakes its way along the coast for quite some distance before flowing out to sea

The rough texture on this tree had me do a double take; why would something look so gnarled?

Upon closer inspection, it looks like it has many layers and that part of the bark was removed at one point.

I touched the bark and discovered that it had some give to it.  Is this a cork tree??

And after completing my nature walk along the lake, I finally returned chez moi and started the process of packing my suitcase.  I think the coming days will be very busy and I want to ensure I don't miss anything or have to shuffle the weight around between suitcases.  We'll see if any of my souvenirs end up being detained by customs, I hope not but wouldn't be surprised.  At this point, I'd say the bags are 70% packed, just gotta wait for the latest load of laundry to dry.