Wined, dined and rested.

So there we were, having planned our Covid holiday really really carefully – our car is full of high alcohol, aloe-enriched, hand gel, we have viricidal wipes and sprays and enough nitrile gloves to equip an army, not to mention all my very natty masks – when there is a new outbreak of the dratted disease somewhere in Aragón, across the border in Spain, which was going to be our next stop.

 

Well, hooray for car travel is what I say to you. We duck, we dive, we turn on a sixpence (or 5p piece for anyone under the age of 50) and hey presto we change our plans. I find a hotel high up in the valley of the Aspe, actually it is the last hotel on that road before the Spanish border, and they have room. Perfect, we adjust with barely a nanosecond’s hesitation, so here we are in the very tiny hamlet of Urdos settling in to the Hotel des Voyageurs.

I know that my fellow-travellers, my little Covid bubble, will forgive me anything since we had to change plans so quickly, and we’re just grateful to have somewhere to lay our heads, but I still try to build up a few compensation points explaining that it will probably be quite basic, but we all love character over pizazz so let’s just make the best of it…… And actually, I can bank those compensation points because this was a really sweet little hotel. It was not expensive, it had no pretensions, but it produced a comfortable night’s sleep, a good simple supper and a sensible breakfast (that was included in the price).

 

It’s a little hard to tell people’s moods when they wear face masks, but it did seem that monsieur and madame were not necessarily extracting every single drop of pleasure from their business at the moment – my attempts at conversation were met with, well, not a lot of return conversation. But we know how much “hospitality” has suffered during this virus situation, and these poor people were at least keeping their hostelry open.

 

However we settled in to our large bedroom, with a pretty view of a mountain…….

… and we told ourselves we didn’t mind about the bathroom, after all character is more important than anonymous beige. Although it did start me thinking about how it has become a joke now (in the UK at least) that all those foolish people in the 1970s loved their avocado-coloured bathrooms, hahaha darling you should have SEEN the avocado everywhere, we HAD to rip it all out and install Swedish beige. Well sweeties, if you thought green was gross, er, try BLUE……

But do you know what? We don’t care.  It was spotlessly clean, everything worked, and once we went downstairs we discovered a lovely little terrace and garden on the first floor where we could have a beer after our long haul from Cognac and relax.

 

So we did, enjoying mountain views and watching the sporadic traffic trudging up and down to and from Spain.

We had supper in the hotel, our first outing to a public place with masks and sanitising our hands every 5 minutes ….

… and we enjoyed “garbure” (vegetable soup, typical of this region)….

….  a salad Landaise (duck done in 3 different ways)….

… and a home made chocolate mousse with biscuit on top (I’m not sure exactly what the broken cookie added to it, but it was very nice).

 

With all this we had a bottle of local Béarn wine which was, um, as we expected – i.e. perfectly drinkable, quite heavy on tannins and very reasonably priced ….

We had a thoroughly good night’s sleep ( as far as I know no-one had blue-bathroom-themed nightmares), and our enjoyment of the breakfast next morning….

… was only enhanced by the fish swimming around outside the window.  Yes, really….

Oh I do love these unexpected stops!  Thank you, Hotel des Voyageurs, I would definitely return if following this same route! Tomorrow we head for Spain – wonder what we will find.