We only had one full day in Canfranc Estación and we took full advantage of it. After Russell finally got back to writing his book in the morning (after a week of preparing for two interviews and the presentation in The Hague), we hiked through the afternoon up the mountain on the west side of town and then, hey why not, drove to France for snacks and cheese.
Canfranc Estación is a little sliver of a town, mainly along a single north-south road with steep mountains to the east, west, and north (toward France).
This is what we saw from our hotel room, looking west as the sun rose.
We decided to go up there.
Here’s a view of the hotel at Canfranc Estación from up on the western slope of town.
We gained altitude very quickly!
The trail had history going back to the creation of the station and town. We could see some structures that were put in for avalanche control. And a little hut which recalled the elves’ houses of Iceland.
Weather moves very quickly in this part of the Pyrenees. Clouds started rolling in, and we rolled over to France. We drove a mountain road about 15 minutes to get to France, and another half hour to get to a village for lunch. Just 15 minutes away, and the villages and farms looked very different from what we were used to in Spain.
The town we ate in, Bedous, was quiet. Emily expected a young woman in a blue dress to start singing about adventure in the great wide somewhere.
We did manage to find an open cheese store. We then took the 8.6 kilometer tunnel back to Canfranc and had our final evening in the wonderful Spanish Pyrenees.
Emily and Russell's Travel Blog 