In this episode: We leave Tarbes, France, and head south into Spain. We stop in Lourdes to see the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes church before continuing south and crossing into Spain thru a very long tunnel. Once in Spain we promptly get lost do do a loss of data on my phone so we eventually have to pick a town to stay the night and find a nice place in Ejea de los Cabelleros! The next day we struggle with navigation while heading to meet up with a friend from my high schools days. Then, significantly behind schedule, we head towards Vitoria Gasteiz to meet another good friend.
0:00 Intro
1:22 Map
1:37 Into Lourdes
2:45 Underground Church
5:35 Into Spain
6:45 More Cows!
10:15 Heading off to meet a friend
12:08 Wrap up.
Hi and welcome back to WeRideMotoz! I’m Glen and I’m Carrie. In this episode we are heading from Tarbes down to and I’m going to try to say this Ejea de los Cabelleros. Wow. It’s probably not right but I tried uh and along the way we’re going to stop at a place called
Lourdes and apparently they have a church there to check out. Yeah check that out. See you then. Okay so this morning there wasn’t a whole lot to see in Tarbes so we got up early and we headed out.
Uh and zipped the way along and when we got to Lourdes, which wasn’t very far, we stopped at a coffee and, oh my goodness, probably the sweetest waffle I think I’ve ever eaten! It was it was just tiny but holy mackerel they put a lot of sugar in it.
It was jazzed you right up for the rest of the day that thing did holy! Yeah that’s for sure! So the reason we stopped in Lourdes and I’m reading my notes because I’m not going to remember all these details but there’s a huge Cathedral here and it’s a it’s a
Big ticket item if you’re a Catholic (it is) and uh it all started in I think around 1858 a young girl was down by this Grotto and she had 18 apparitions of Mary. The local priests they all figured this was worthy of a cathedral and by what do I have here 1876
They had built the upper Basilica and underneath it was the Crypt which was the original church now I believe it was all built at the same time but that’s where uh where they started. Yeah it was quite a a different type of church because it just
Had all these layers and it was it was actually really interesting to visit. Yeah big long walkway you approach it so uh you wander down this walkway and as we’re walking along we heard music or singing. We heard this music and it looked like it was coming out of this tunnel well it
I thought it was just speakers. Yeah but we have of course we really like under anything underground or tunnels and stuff. Ahh my inner gopher was coming out. So we had to go check this I so we walked down this long tunnel and sure
Enough there was this huge underground ,I guess it’s an underground church, and they were having mass and all the people were singing and it was just. This (actually really) this church is massive it’ll seat upwards of 25,000 people (this underground
Church) this underground church. This isn’t even anything to do with the main church (yeah) As we left uh we came around so I’m not exactly what sure but we came down the front stairs and kind of swung around to the left and
Around behind they were holding another mass or another another event anyway. That was an outside Mass. Yeah and just past that you can come to a wall where you can fill up your water bottle with the Lourdes’ water (that’s right) which is spring water piped out of The Grotto where the apparitions happened.
So it had all these little fountains but it was I we saw some people trying to fill them up it was kind of just dripping. Well, I actually did some research on that and they made that portion where it dribbled out like that so you only got enough water for your I can’t
Remember what they call that but your the basic religious stuff and if you wanted to fill up a water bottle well they had another space where the water flowed (oh that’s why) This particular Church and the surrounding area has been criticized as the Disneyland of the Catholic church just because of the commercialization.
So well on the street leading to the church yeah it was just yeah. The church itself is great there’s nothing on the grounds but yeah definitely on the. Gift shop selling everything you could possibly think of. Once we were done in Lourdes we packed the bike up and we headed out on what
Was supposed to be a reasonably short day because tomorrow we were going to meet up with a friend of mine from high school so that didn’t turn out as planned. In Carrie’s favor we did go up a little mountain road and guess what we saw up there.
Oh it was just lovely we’ll show you hopefully yeah there’s we’ll show (you took some videos of the cows) yeah there was more cows with the bells which yeah I’m a sucker for that and it was I guess in we’re cross crossing over into Spain today and in these mountain areas the
Families on Sundays, it was a Sunday, they pack up their picnics and they go up into these mountain areas where all these animals are on range and they take their tables and their picnics. Yeah they hawked everything, they had boxes and bags and everything
And up into the meadow where the cows are set up. Set up their tables at lunch. Yeah it was it was really neat (pretty cool) it was really pretty up in the as we got up into the mountains
Barrier? Bar the Canadian? Which I had to kind of stop are they saying we can’t go there? No Canadians? No Canadians. Something about their cattle guards they call them Canadian barriers. We cross into Spain and it happened a little differently than we had anticipated we entered
This tunnel and actually I think we were getting low on fuel at the time. We were. We actually stopped on before we enter the tunnel and there was some kind of police police checkpoint or something there. So we just asked how far to the next gas station and of course
Language barriers we didn’t quite understand what she meant but she said after the tunnel and I thought she said like 12 km or something. This tunnel went on and on and on (so we went into the tunnel) and it got colder and colder and colder.
The France side go into the tunnel and came out of the tunnel in Spain I was navigating from the back and my Google Map recalculated. We got lost basically. It was a little longer day. We hadn’t booked our accommodations for the night so we had we came down out of
The mountains and stopped for a coffee and figured we probably better find a place in Ejea de los Cabelleros and that’s where we stayed for the night and uh. I think there was lots of little towns that we went through but none of them seemed to have accommodations.
It was little, we might not of had a spot because we were having trouble finding it tonight. Yeah. Winging it usually works for us because we’re off season but uh it was a little close on this one. It was yeah.
So I parked Pepe in the no parking zone and we called it a night So we packed up in the morning and uh we’re leaving Ejea de los Cabelleros! I just love saying it. You like to say I was going to say.
And uh but part of the reason we got lost yesterday it was we realized now that our data had (yeah) failed or ran out. I think we were running on my Italian SIM card.
We found out later you only have a certain amount of out of country data which we had used up as we made our way through France so by the time we hit Spain we didn’t have any data left. So we we we left got lost again took a big D tour,
Rolled into town an hour and a half late because we couldn’t contact anybody because we didn’t have any data uh but in true European style uh my friend who, you know it’s been 30 plus years I didn’t recognize her at all from back in high school,
Uh but they were just enjoying a coffee and waiting for us to finally show up so yeah we sat down had a had a coffee had a great visit you know they showed us their home and and uh her husband
And her sons are into for sport or for fun it’s kind of like running the bulls or hey uh you know. I think they’ve had some close encounters. Yes they have. So it was quite interesting we were kind of wondering why you
Would do that as opposed to play soccer but. Yeah soccer seems a little safer! Certainly does. Yeah so we finished up the visit it was great to see them again. uh saw her and her brother uh who were both in high school with me and we headed out uh quite a number
Of hours behind schedule because uh we did have a straight shot on the highway into Vitoria and that’s where we’ll end this episode when we catch up with our friends Mike and Shelly in Vitoria and we spend a couple days with them. Yeah.
If you found this video interesting we’d really appreciate a like and subscribe and leave a comment if there’s anything we can do to improve it. That’d be great appreciate it thank you.