Basque country or bust!: Day 7 - Pic du Midi de Bigorre

Day 7. It's absolutely flown past already. I had a decent nights sleep and I woke up without a headache. I decided to go and see the Pic du Midi which is quite near to Luz. There's just a small matter of going up the Col du Tourmalet one last time to get there. I drove straight up this time. I was doing a steady 40 mph in third gear when I got overtaken by a Porsche and then quickly followed by an Audi R8 both with German plates marked with TUT! How dare these upstarts from Tuttlingen out-horsepower my old crate! In overtaking me the bloke in the Audi R8 almost took out a cyclist coming the other way. The cyclist shook his fist in anger. I wonder if they were the German Top Gear team? Or D Motor!

Anyway, I went over the top of the Col and back down towards La Mongie. This is where you get the cable car from to the top of the Pic du Midi which is 2,877 metres high or 1,918 Smithys! It's normally 30 euros to go up but I got in for 27 euros. I had a coupon from the visit to Pont d'Espagne earlier in the week. Mum will be proud.

So up, up and away I went in the cable car with a motley crew of French and Flemish. One of the french guys had a rather superb Don Corleone type voice. We arrived a few minutes later to a collective show of silent apathy until the cable car operator told us that this was the middle station and not the final destination. Cue a collective sigh of relief.

I'm usually quite good with heights but today was a little different. After the middle station there's another mountain to clear first and then there's a drop of about 900 metres in between that mountain and the Pic du Midi for the last 5 minutes or so. The wind picked up and the cable car shook a couple of times. It reminded me of Where Eagles Dare a little bit.

Still we made it in one piece. Sitting on top of the mountain is the Observatoire du Pic du Midi de Bigorre, which is home to France's largest telescope and a huge amount of Astronomical Research. It's position is also very close to the Greenwich Meridian.

So I hung out there for a little while whilst breaking my own personal altitude record and the family record for eating soup at altitude. It was mushroom today. It's a breaktaking place to be. You could briefly see the Vignemale, the Munia and Monte Perdido in the background which are some of the biggests peaks the Pyrenees could offer. It also looks directly down on the Col du Tourmalet which looks much lower than just the 763 metres it actually is. The weather wasn't perfect for viewing but the clouds move around so quickly that it must be rare to have the perfect view of everything.

After that it was the return journey back to La Mongie. Then a slightly longer but far less hilly route back home via Bagnères-de-Bigorre and then heading back towards Lourdes but thankfully bypassing it before returning to Luz.

Anyway fotos du jour.

Firstly one for you Alpaca fans out there...at least I think it's an Alpaca.