Thursday 22nd December 2016

Strange goings on today. I woke up very early this morning to find one of the lights in the van turned on - the light which goes on when you open a door. Thought we had been burgled but clearly we had not.  Came south to St Bertrand de Commininges, which by coincidence is the home town of Ann's daughter Hannah's partner's mother!

This is clearly very unfriendly territory. The former Aire de Camping Cars is now adorned with these nasty signs saying that the likes of us can park here but not "camp" here whatever that might mean. The signs also direct us to a nearby campsite which was, inevitably at this time of year, closed. Pathetic! Next time I see George's mum I will let her know about all this and maybe she might decide to have a quiet word with the Mayor?

Strange things turned to nasty things. We couldn't lock our van! Nowadays this kind of thing is electronic and something was stopping the van being locked. Eventually I tracked it down to a faulty sensor on the sliding door which had also clearly been responsible for turning the light on in the night. I managed to disconnect the sensor and now everything works well but of course if we don't shut the sliding door properly we won't have a warning light to let us know. Above is a picture of St B de C's Cathedral.

While I was trying to sort out the non locking van Ann was inspecting the adjoining roman remains of Lugdunum Convenarum pictured here. It seems like most of the stones from here were used to build St B de C's Cathedral.

Anyway as we were clearly not welcome at St B de C we moved on to the nearby Grottes de Gargas cave which has prehistoric rock paintings. It was about 1.30 when we got there and the next tour wasn't till 3.00 so Ann decided to def the Grottes out and we retraced our route to the town of Lannemezan where we are staying tonight at the Aire de Camping Cars. It has rained quite a lot here today and I imagine there must be a lot of new snow up in the Pyrenees, which we are planning to try to cross tomorrow!

Today we traveled 69 miles (111 kilometres). We are at N43.12842 E0.38113