Day 10 - Rue de la Filature 😡

Rue de la Filature - Oloron- Sainte- Marie

The day started good. Up, reasonably early, we had another chat to out Brit neighbours, this time over a map, of more places to go in Spain. We decided we would, initially, stick to Plan A and go into the Pyrenees first, at least for one day of mountains then see how the weather was. The only way to get to the roads we wanted was to go thru the town center. 

  Oloron-Sainte-Marie started off in the 1st century, built by the Romans, on either side of the river in a fairly steep sided valley. It still maintains some VERY narrow streets, one or two we had noticed when we passed thru.

      The sat nav route agreed with Google maps so off we went, only to get stopped in our tracks by roadworks and blocked roads.  No problem, let the sat nav recalculate....🥴... here we go again! To be fair, Google maps agreed but both were having a laugh! 

We ended up going down a very steep, tight twisty, single road heading for the river, and then we went round one bend too many and came to a dead end. "We should have turned left at the bottom of the last bend..." said I, looking at the screen. "Left? there is no left" said Jill.

There was 😱, .....thru a hole in the wall! 

A tiny little street that cuts thru to the main road. "Your taking the **** " said Jill, "we wont fit thru there!". I jumped out and went to have a look. It was possible, we would clear the height but it was tight and it turned slightly almost as you got thru. What made it worst was that it sloped down and it had a priority traffic sign, priority was for traffic coming in and UP it from the opposite direction we wanted to go.

 "I'll go and block anybody coming in, you take it easy." Leaning out and turning the wing mirrors in, Jill got practically all the way thru when a tatty little car with a old man and his son? got past me and stopped in front of her. I had to leave her too it. If any more cars had turned off the main road and in behind this one, we would be really stuck.

I was doing my best to explain to the 3 cars, now blocking traffic on the main road over the river, what was going on and not to move while Jill was out of the van and , explaining (😤) to the car driver that she simply could NOT reverse, up hill, round a bend with inches to spare in a 3.5t campervan without  mirrors!.... besides, she was already thru when he turned up and he should have  stopped at the main road when he saw her.

     When I next looked back, she was storming back to the van to get something. Thankfully, it was her phone and not a blunt instrument 😉 ; Google translate saved the day and, reluctantly, the car reversed and she was able to drive onto the kerb and give enough room for it and the now gathered, convoy of irate drivers, to speed thru the gap.

 Once on the main road and a few miles till the next turn, I looked up the 'Entry of death' on google maps. I almost wet myself with laughter 🤣🤣🤣 when I saw that the Google Street View car had had the same problem we had, only they got an ambulance  😂😂😂.

The icing on the cake was that somebody actually lives at No.1 Rue de la Filature as you can see from the door on the right 😂.

     After all this tramua, driving up into the Pyrenees, thru very narrow, mountain villages, heading for the snow line was childs play.

Even the huge stainless steel nets over the road, to collect falling rocks, didnt bother us or the old , covered road ways.

It didnt take us long to get to our site for the

next 2 nights in Lux-Saint-Sauveur;  Les Cascades Camping sits at 2402 feet above sealevel on a mountain side; the pitches are arranged on terraces and it has excellent facilities. Bagged a decent spot with a view of the mountains and the snowline.