Day 1: Home to Bordeaux

At some point towards the end of last year, I booked cheap flights to Bordeaux for August bank holiday. It's hard to get any kind of cheap flight for August bank holiday these days, but these were pretty reasonably-priced and I thought it would be fun to explore a part of France we hadn't been to before. I hadn't really thought through what our plans for the rest of the year were going to be, and when we ultimately ended up booking a trip to Tanzania for the World Esperanto Conference at the start of August, I realised belatedly that this meant we'd be getting back from Africa, spending four days at home and then flying to Bordeaux. Even with our love of holidays, that felt like it might be a bit much!

I decided to try and move the Bordeaux flights and ended up switching them to a weekend in July. So it was that we drove down to Gatwick last night and stayed in a Holiday Inn ahead of a 07.30 flight to France this morning. Or, at least, it was supposed to be a 07.30 flight to France!

Everything started off well. We got up at 04.30, drove a couple of miles to the airport parking and got straight on a bus to the airport. Although Gatwick felt busy, there was barely any wait at security and we were soon sitting in Wetherspoons with a coffee and a sausage sandwich. We had some minor excitement when Tim discovered an unattended bag (someone had lost their passport!) and we went to hand it in at security. Our flight was called for boarding shortly after 06.30 and by 07.00 we were sitting on it, ready to depart. I thought we might even end up taking off early!

Unfortunately, a series of things seemed to go wrong. First of all there was some sort of commotion at the front of the plane, which resulted in a group of passengers being "offboarded". There was then a delay while the cabin crew did a security check to make sure they'd taken all their hand baggage with them; this involved them taking every bag stored above the first 10 rows out of the overhead lockers and asking people to claim them. 

That may have meant we missed the initial slot for take-off, but we then seemed to sit on the tarmac for a suspiciously long time. Eventually the captain made an announcement to say that there was a technical fault with plane. Oh dear! It turned out to be something pretty minor - it sounded like a broken intercom system, some sort of problem with the phone used for communication between the cabin and the cockpit - but it meant we weren't going anywhere until engineers came to sort it out. The good news was that engineers did arrive and manage to fix it. The bad news was that we then had an announcement saying it was going to be another hour until we got a slot to take-off. Wow  

There were various further updates but to cut a long story short, it was close to 10am before we finally departed Gatwick. The only good news was that we didn't have any connections to go anywhere else, so while the delay was frustrating it didn't actually ruin any of our plans. And the delay had apparently been long enough for us to get a complimentary coffee and bar of chocolate from EasyJet once we were in the air

We landed in Bordeaux some time after midday, queued for passport control and then jumped on a tram into the city centre. The tram was really good value; EUR 1.90 each for a single ticket. The journey took about 30 minutes and dropped us off right in the middle of the city, by the cathedral. By this point it was getting close to 2pm and so our main priority was to find lunch, as it can be difficult to eat in France outside of an official meal-time. We ended up at an Indian restaurant where we had a daily lunch menu that involved chicken tikka as a starter...

...followed by chicken tikka masala as a main.

Not the most French meal I suppose but it was delicious and really good value

After that we set out to explore a bit of Bordeaux. The restaurant was just down the road from this beautiful archway...

This is the Porte d'Aquitaine.

We walked through it into a large square, which was also home to this rather unusual twisted obelisk.

We passed through the square and began walking towards the river. We passed lots of impressive architecture on our way...

...including several beautiful churches.

We also found another city gate!

Eventually we made it to the Pont de pierre, a large bridge across the river.

The river which flows through Bordeaux is the Garonne (the same river which flows through Toulouse).

It's absolutely enormous here (and also a rather murky shade of brown!).

We strolled along by the river for a while, passing the impressive tower.

There were some gorgeous displays of flowers along by the river.

Soon we were getting close to the city's main square, Place de la Bourse.

The architecture in this part of the town make it a World Heritage Site and it wasn't hard to see why; it was all very grand!

As we turned away from the river and began to make our way towards our hotel, we passed through more impressive squares.

This one admittedly had a rather unusual sculpture of a head!

We're staying for three nights in a Mercure just outside the city centre and I'm pleased to report that the room seems pretty normal

Once we'd checked in I had a short nap to recover from the early start, before getting ready to head out again and explore a bit of Bordeaux by night.