On the road (3) A (hopefully) sunny September road trip to Spain COMPLETED - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
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Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
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To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
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Monday 6 September – part one: I think we’re running a bit late...
Our day started early, but not quite as early as planned. The idea was to be on the road by 7am, as we knew that we had around nine hours driving ahead of us and we wanted to get an early start. Mark told me he’d set the cell phone to wake us up at 5.30am, which it dutifully did. The only problem was five minutes later, I was on the computer and realised it was saying 5.40am. As it was on British time, it meant that we were an hour ahead. Oh, it’s already 6.40am. I guess it’s time to speed things up then!
Full credit to us, we were downstairs for breakfast just before 7am and had finished our spread not long afterwards. We took one load of stuff down to the car, then returned for the final bits and finally headed out in the car by about 7.40am, which wasn’t at all bad, bearing in mind the time we’d got up.
I tell you what, I’m glad we didn’t leave much later. Although it was still getting light outside (there are some downsides to being an hour ahead over here), the traffic was already building and we hit a fair few jams as we headed out of the city, which surprised us, as I’d expected all the traffic to be heading into the city, but apparently not. :
Fortunately, soon the traffic died down and we were into what felt like the middle of nowhere, which is better known as the Regional Park of the Landes. According to my guidebook, something like 778,000 acres, mainly of trees, are protected here, along with the wildlife and people who live here. As we drove along, we saw nothing but trees, which did become a bit monotonous after a while. The whole time, the sun was trying to peak through and burn off the mist, which was quite dense in places, although at least it didn’t affect driving at all.
In this photo, you can see the irrigation system they use on crops
It’s probably just as well they have those 778,000 acres, judging by the amount of logging we saw taking place. I’m sure they know what they’re doing, but my goodness, it did seem like they were cutting down a heck of a lot of trees.
They were building new toll booths on this road
Soon, we started to come out of the forest and headed towards our first stop of the day, which was Bayonne. It’s actually in the northern Pays Basque region, something I tend to associate with Spain, but there is also a Basque country in southern France as well. It wasn’t that obvious here, although we certainly saw references to it as we arrived. We drove around the town first....
... before managing to find a parking spot right on the banks of the River Nive, which runs right through the centre of the town. After parking for an hour, we set off to wander up to Bayonne Cathedral. The first thing we saw was a free electric bus to ferry people about the town, which I thought was a really neat idea. I don’t know anywhere else that does anything like this. :
Next: this isn’t as impressive as others we’ve seen....
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Oh, it’s already 6.40am. I guess it’s time to speed things up then! 
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