Day 51 – Toulouse France

Traveling on a budget exposes the tourist to unique experiences.  

At 3:00am I woke up and began to consider my options for today.  Recent experience has taught me that waiting to the last minute and hoping something works out is not the most stress-free approach.  So I got up, moved to the alburgue kitchen as the WiFi is better there, and began to search for buses to Toulouse. 

No problem, a “Ouibus” leaves from Hendaye, the next town over, at 10:30am.  I purchased the 19€ ticket online, and reserved a room for two nites at the Hotel de Bordeaux as well. 

I left the alburgue at about 7:30 and followed Google maps directions to the Hendaye Ouibus bus station on foot.  

Twenty minutes later this left me standing on a city street in front of a boulangerie.  

I went in and asked the proprietor where the Ouibus bus station was located.  She pointed to a bus stop on the street and said “Oui”.  

I explained that I had purchased my ticket on line to go to Toulouse. She enthusiastically said “Ouibus, oui”, oui, oui”.  

I held up my phone and said with incredulity. “So I can just show the driver my confirmation email and get on?”   

“Oui, oui, oui”. 

I’ve learned by now that my expectations are generally wrong in the presence of contradicting local knowledge, so I checked the time (about 8:00am) and said “It looks like I have some time on my hands.” I bought a cookie 🍪 as a gesture of thanks and wandered off looking for somewhere to kill a couple hours.

A few blocks away there was a city park with one of those little wooden cabinets with books to share.  I rifled through a bunch of paperbacks with titles like “Les Liaisons dangereuses” and some hardbound books that were old, musty, and all in French.

Then I came across this January 1931 copy of National Geographic which happened to have a several page travel article on northwest Spain, the exact area I just spent a month walking through.  It was fascinating to read this early review of Galatia, Santiago de Compostela, San Sebastián, and other areas from my Camino.    I spent most of my extra time in that park just reading until a kindergarten class arrived to burn off some energy on the playground.  

I returned to the bus stop in front of the boulangerie and at exactly 10:30 a coach style bus pulled up and the driver hopped out.  I tried to show him me email ticket confirmation but he was too busy scrolling through a list on his cellphone.  Pretty soon he said “Jason Pryde?”

I said “Oui!”, having just expanded my French vocabulary by about 30%.

He motioned me onboard. There were a few other stops along the way but  five hours later we pulled into the bus station in Toulouse.

Fortunately, my hotel was only about 4 blocks away because…

…it was hot in Toulouse today.

It is supposed to be cooler tomorrow so I will go explore the city that is the centre of the European aerospace industry and home to one of the oldest universities in Europe.

Buen Camino,
– jgp