Today is my birthday. I feel very excited.

I’m supposed to be at home with my family gathered round me, because I’m 67 years old and they think I am going a bit strange.

Well sorry kids. You can stick that. I feel like I’m just 7 years old and today I am going on an adventure. A train ride. On a very special train.

As it’s my birthday, for breakfast I’m going to have a chocolate croissant.

The croissants are made by paul. He is all over Paris. All his shops say vinnoiseres,  maison de qualitie en 1889. I don’t know what this means but I think he must be very good. And very old.

He spells his name with a small p. Most days I just have a small pee as well. I might have to go and see someone about this .

The croissant was very yummy. But they are difficult to eat and I spilt chocolate and flakes all down my front. It seems to happen a lot these days. At least I wasn’t wearing my new pyjamas.

For my birthday I got some new pyjamas. They are blue on blue and soft and comfy. When you get old everything must be comfortable. In a previous post I said one of the reasons for walking the Camino was to take us out of our comfort zone!

Gare Montparnasse is really three train stations joined together. One level is local and underground trains, another is long distance and international and a bus terminus. The third probably interstellar, the moon or Mars maybe.

There are twenty four platforms in the long distance station. We are in coach 16 and in about the middle of the train so there are 30+ coaches. Both first and second class (us) are fully booked.

The train is a TGV – train a grande vitesse.  It is silver and shaped like a bullet.   It looks wickedly fast. I think it can do over 320km/hr. Once it did 575km /hr. We sometimes run parallel to the motorway and vehicles that would be doing 110 km/hr disappear backwards at about 100km/hr. The foreground is just a blur, the eye and brain are not fast enough to focus on anything. The middle ground is like watching a movie with the remote stuck on fast forward. Your eye cannot linger on anything for more than a few seconds before it disappears. Lamp posts rush by as if they are picket fences.

France is flat.  From Paris to the Pyrenees there is hardly a bump. The bright blue sky hangs down to a low horizon, there are no hills or mountains in the distance to push it up.

France is agricultural. Every square metre is divided up into paddocks. Brown for the ploughed, every shade of green and brilliant yellow for the rapeseed. A few trees, usually corralled up and fenced into some unusable corner.

No animals!  Where have all the animals gone? No cows, no sheep, cattle no horses, no pigs. Everywhere there are crops. They grow things, not rear things.

Lovely single farm houses, all white plastered with clay tile roofs, small windows and shutters. Then five or six houses gathered at a road intersection. Some villages hiding in trees, always with a church steeple and sometimes with a larger chateau on a bit of higher ground. The bigger villages have large storage sheds and silos next to sidings of the railway track.

And wind turbines. Sometimes a lonely outcast all on its own usually 5 to 10 grouped together hickeldy pickeldy, and then some armies, perfectly spaced, row after row of them.

The train is smooth and quiet, no clickety clack, clickety clack, no swaying, no creaking or jerking. Just a soft background hum – probably the air conditioning. It feels like the train is standing still and the world is rushing by.

After about 5 hours the train stopped at Dax where we alighted to change trains. We had 13 minutes to get our connection. 13 minutes counts down real fast when you don’t know what the hell is going on. Everyone in a uniform gave us different instructions, none of which we could understand. To get from platform to platform involved going down steps, through tunnels and coming up to the surface again. We did this four times before finding our train. It was the Bayonne train but was named Hendayes.

We got on the train with seconds to spare. The French pride themselves on trains running to the schedule. We were all a bit hot and flustered and my birthday wasn’t so much fun anyone. The train was an ordinary suburban train, noisy and swaying about and went clickety clack. Duh!  How could that be, it’s the same track as the TGV. It went like a snail in comparison.

After an hour’s ride we had another connection at Bayonne to St Jean Pied de Port. We only had a prepaid voucher for this and 3 pages of downloaded instructions on how to self print a ticket from a machine.  The station at Bayonne had four different types of machines and none of them would recognise us. We put in our name and the code we had been given but were rejected. We thought in the computer world our input may have had a Kiwi accent and so re-entered the info very slowly and clearly but we’re rejected again. There were too many drop down menus and options and we couldn’t really understand any of them so went and talked to a real person at the ticket desk and within about 20 seconds the lady had printed us tickets, put them in a cute little envelope and purred merci monsieur.

The third train of the day was a single carriage sort of rail car we had in NZ in the seventies. It was packed with us pilgrims and everyone had big packs, poles,sleeping bags, sleeping mats, groceries etc. It took nearly an hour to St Jean but now we were approaching the mountains and so went through steep sided gorges, crossed rushing streams etc.

St Jean Is the end of the line from Paris, where you hit the Pyrenees. The Swiss would have started tunnelling but the French just stopped so from here we walk.

St Jean Pied de Port is an old walled medieval town, a stronghold guarding several of the easier passes over the Pyrenees. Inside the walls of the old town had the Citadel on top of a hill, narrow winding streets, cobble stone footpaths. Outside were the rugby fields, schools, supermarkets,  etc. We found our hotel easy enough, what was once a grand mansion was now a run down but charming hotel.

We were met by the large and jolly owner who we knew liked his rugby and followed the All Blacks. He looked like he may have been a prop back in about 1970. He bundled us into a tiny telephone sized box of a lift and then ran up the stairs to be waiting for us on the second floor.

We explored all the streets, climbed all the battlements, got our first stamp in our pilgrim passport and found a restaurant for an evening meal. One option is a set menu for peregrinos for 12 euros, which we had,  3 courses and a carafe of red wine.

First course soup of potato, carrot, onion, lentils and a bag of salt.

Second course of fried chicken and chips.

Third course of Basque cake made with almonds.

It was a stunning, warm,sunny evening and wonderful to just relax with the red wine and reflect on all that had happened on a birthday I will never forget. The town is full of excited, nervous, apprehensive, confused but happy pilgrims all ready to start a bit of a walk tomorrow. We wandered back to our hotel and I put on my new pyjamas and slept very well.

Ipod song for the day sung by Joan Baez:

Lord I’m one,  Lord I’m two, Lord I’m three,  Lord I’m four, Lord I’m five hundred miles way from home.

We are five hundred miles from Santiago.  Doesn’t bear thinking about.