When you live in Bordeaux and you want to go to the beach you have a few options: Arcachon, Biertiz, and a few more. Each is about an hour train ride away but the most popular one for Bordeaux is Arcachon (possibly because it is so easy to get to). This past Friday, Lea, Coral and I took a day trip there and we had a blast! To get there we took a ten-minute train ride and an hour-long bus trip (it wasn’t too bad though because we decided to make mimosas on the bus, you know, to keep it classy). We got there at around 10:30 and found out that there was a bus that goes to Dune de Pyla (the biggest sand dune in all of Europe) leaving at 11:45, so we decided to walk around and check out the city for a bit. Arcachon is so adorable, it feels like a beach town the second you step foot off of the bus. It was warm and sunny, there were even palm trees! This city is more like an old-person beach town though, which I personally prefer, so there weren’t a lot of teenagers running amuck. The bus finally comes, but right before we hop on this class of about 20 students gets on and the bus driver just turns to us and says, “sorry no more room, there is another bus in two hours”. Two hours!? We decided then that it would be better and more enjoyable for us to just walk to the beach. It was such a nice walk, the houses were gorgeous and there wasn’t anyone on the beach, and it ended up getting up to 29.5 degrees Celsius (that’s like 80F). We found a nice place on the beach to lay out and eat our salad and drink our let’s-just-put-oranges-and-juice-into-our-wine sangria.
(the sangria is in the water bottle!)
We ended up just lounging around for about 4 hours—it was heaven! Then we decided to try and find the actual dune, so we started walking and every time there was a bend in the coast we would say, “Oh, I bet it’s just around this bend!”…but it never was. After walking for over an hour we finally see the dune! It really is huge!
We are so excited and we know this time it really is just around the bend, unfortunately this particular bend before the dune turns into a little cove which was easily going to be another two miles (at least) of walking. We had a train to catch, so we decided at this point that it would be better just to come back again and go to the dune. We head back towards town and find a bus stop where the bus is supposed to come in five minutes. We are sitting there, sore, tired, and a pretty hungry when we see the bus…zoom past us. The top of the bus said “complet” which meant that this bus too was full, and there wasn’t going to be another for two hours. We ended up walking all the way back into town and just barely made it onto our train home. By the end of the day we were all so exhausted, hungry, and sunburned, but it was well worth it. I had forgotten how much I love the beach and how much I really do miss it! I think I know how I will be spending my summer vacation!
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