It was the thing I didn’t want to do, travel to Europe. Did I hear myself? My mother wanted to go, I didn’t.
My mother expressed interest in traveling to Lourdes (no “s”), where one of the most visited religious sites for Catholics is located, the Grotto of Massabielle. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette as a young teenage girl in 1858, and people believe in the curative properties of the water running from the grotto. I had no clue where Lourdes was, even though I had chosen Bernadette as my confirmation name (I saw the movie The Song of Bernadette when I was a kid). The town is in the Pyrenees, on the French side. Kind of in the middle of nowhere, at least nowhere I’d ever been.
I have a bias against traveling to France – for one, I don’t speak the language. I do travel to countries where I don’t speak the language, but French is a sore reminder of the time I tried to learn the language and failed (never mind that I was trying to do that in Norwegian). My first time to Paris I couldn’t even convince a travel agent to sell me a ticket because he didn’t speak English.
“We don’t like traveling to Paris either,” a French friend said to me.
But I also knew France is different outside of Paris. In Toulouse, a woman in a market said “no” to all the other languages I was proficient enough in to make a mundane purchase of some fruit. It didn’t bother her. She just started asking me questions in French anyway. Did I have a man? Who was I staying with? Did I like Toulouse?
The reality was I’d had a brutal trip to Europe the year before. My wallet got lifted in Florence, a city I’d visited at least once a year over two decades. I knew the town and the perils. I then headed straight into a historic snow dump on the city of Munich in the first few days of December that year. The airline didn’t cancel my flight just two days after the snowstorm, so I spent nearly 12 hours at the airport, after overcoming the absolute chaos of delayed passengers, only to be told to come back another day. The plane wasn’t even parked at the gate at departure time. When it did show up, it arrived with about 10 cm of snow on the wings and the roof, and an announcement that the wheels had been frozen to the tarmac. After rebooking my flight for two days later, I left the airport, but without my suitcase, which I wouldn’t see for another three weeks, just 3 days before Christmas.
So, no, I wasn’t ready to go back to Europe.
I dragged my feet. When I proposed some options about a month before her usual time to travel in the fall, my mother said, “It’s too late this year.”
I carried that guilt with me for another few months.
Then a cousin said to me, “Create memories. I wish my mom was still here so that I could travel to Europe with her.”
When the talk of Lourdes began again the next spring, I’d had a year to let the idea percolate. I was still stuck. “What am I going to do with this?” I thought. From Lourdes to Florence? Not a logical route. A fast train from Paris made it easy enough to reach Lourdes, but I didn’t know what to do after that. The fast train back to Paris and then to Florence? Or a regional train to Toulouse and then fly to Florence? Direct flights were not convenient from Paris (too early) and weren’t even available from Toulouse, at least not in November. I didn’t want to spend a day in the air to get there.
I looked at the map. “Hmmm,” I thought, “Lourdes is not that far from Toulouse, and Toulouse is not that far from the French Riviera. A four-hour train ride gets you to Marseille.”
That was it. The geographical reality that broke through my resistance to a trip with a starting point in Lourdes. I thought we could take the fast train to Lourdes and then migrate our way down to the coast, stopping at the cities on the Riviera we wanted to visit and then over to Florence, all by train.
Coming to this realization on my own (alright a year in development) was especially gratifying, since I could have just consulted with ChatGPT for an answer.
I sent out an email to a French couple I know living in Toulouse.
“Have you been to Lourdes? Do you recommend any towns on the way from Lourdes to Nice to visit?”
“We’ll get back to you.” Summer in Europe – everyone is on holiday.
It turned out I didn’t need to ask. My mother planned the whole trip over the course of about a week. Her itinerary included the cities she wanted to visit, the number of days, the hotels and even some restaurants. With a little digging, my mother discovered that Air Corsica, an airline I didn’t know existed, flies direct from Nice to Florence. How convenient was that? The airport is close to the city center, right on the Mediterranean. You can even walk to the airport from the city center.
A week before take-off my mother instructed me to book the fast train from Paris to Lourdes. I like to wait until I land to know which train I will make. I booked the tickets reluctantly which turned out to be a critical move. The first glitch in our multi-city itinerary happened before we left the USA. Our fast train from Paris to Lourdes was cancelled the morning before our departure from Chicago.
“Due to weather,” our email said.
I texted my friends in Toulouse and asked if it was weather or a covert way of saying, the train workers are on strike (it happens). Which would blow a huge hole in our plans.
“No, it is the weather. Storm Benjamin.”
All the trains were cancelled for the day of our arrival and sold out already for the next. My sister worked out an alternative plan, a flight to Toulouse (on air miles) and then a two-hour train ride to Lourdes. It’s beyond my comprehension why trains were cancelled in a powerful windstorm but not planes. Our flight to Toulouse was an hour delayed. Yet, we made it, a little bumpy on the descent, to the train station in Toulouse (Matabiau) with 30 minutes to catch the second-to-the-last train to Lourdes.
I knew the time of departure for the train to Lourdes, not the last stop. I thought I’d recognize our train on the board by the departure time alone, 17:36. Not a standard time. Nope, another train was also leaving at 17:36. I needed the train number (six numbers long!), and once I had that, I figured out which track our train was on. When we reached the track, two trains were there. I stuck my head into the first one and asked, “Lourdes?” A passenger was kind enough to direct me to the next train. I ran to the next train where a conductor on the platform confirmed it was the train I wanted. He realized I didn’t speak French and for whatever reason started to speak in Spanish. Spanish I can manage. I love that about that area in France so close to the Spanish border. He told me I had to buy the ticket first and then get on the train. Lack of sleep must have contributed to my repeated mistakes at the SNCF website which is not that user friendly anyway.
“The conductor on the train said it’s ok for you to get on and buy the tickets then,” the man said.
The train was packed with people, hard to imagine how the car could take in two more adults, each with a suitcase, but we fit, with my mother finding a seat.
After all that, no one checked our tickets.
The train rolled through leprechaun-green hills and mountains, dropping us at our destination after dark. The Lourdes train station is almost two kilometers out of the center of town where our hotel was located. The traffic was light around the station, so taxis weren’t circling for impromptu pick-ups. I didn’t have a clue how to reach our hotel, except to walk. Just as panic was about to take over, a taxi pulled up to drop some people off. I ran to ask if the driver would take us to our hotel. We ended up sharing the taxi with three German women also desperate for transportation to the center.
“I know who you ladies are,” the woman at reception in the Grande Hôtel Moderne said.
We had made it. Twenty-four hours after we left Chicago, but we made it. Our version of a pilgrimage.
We had considered canceling our hotel during some back and forth with the hotel because of a possible late arrival the next day. In the end, it was already too late to cancel without the penalty of paying for the first night, so we kept our reservation. Good thing, because Lourdes was packed with “pilgrims” that weekend near the end of the season. The shops close in November, and their owners go on vacation for 6 months until the pilgrimages start again in the spring.
The Grande Hotel Moderne was designed in the style of a Parisian structure from the 1800s decorated with those patterned, wrought iron railings on the balconies, and it had a grand wooden, red-carpeted staircase. The hotel was a five-minute walk from the grotto, in an area of the town with a high concentration of unremarkable restaurants (where we ate a microwaved paella the first night), and shops filled with religious souvenirs and candles. I’d never thought of candle making as a revenue earning business until I arrived in Lourdes. Every “pilgrim” lights at least one candle for someone they know. Praying for their health. Praying for their enlightenment to find a more productive path in life.
The woman at reception recited the agenda for the religious events taking place during the day: Catholic masses throughout the day, the rosary at 15:00, water gesture at the baths from 9:00 to 11:30 and 14:00 to 16:30. Otherwise, water flows 24/7 from the grotto through taps nearby, where people drink it, soak their bodies in it, or fill large volume jugs with the miracle liquid and carry it home. After watching for several minutes, even I, a scientist, succumbed to the ritual, you know, just in case.
People with diverse maladies flock to Lourdes seeking cures. It’s humbling to be in the midst of young and old arriving from around the world in wheelchairs or reclined gurneys, the most obvious with eye patches or missing limbs. That’s when the magic of the town hits you – you realize how lucky you were to reach adulthood – and that there’s nothing average about that.
Each night at 21:00, pilgrims (or whoever) participate in the Torchlight procession, reciting the rosary while carrying lit candles.
“You don’t have to believe in the religious significance of Lourdes, in the miracles, but you have to admit that something spiritual is happening there,” a German friend, who had carried a wounded soldier to the grotto, said.
Or maybe it’s just primitive. I was transported back during the procession to my first Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Bergen, Norway, where people gathered with flaming torches, and had felt the power of community and humanity.
I was also focused on not catching my hair on fire. Or worse, not catching someone else on fire with my candle.
I’m embarrassed to admit I spent any time at all in the souvenir shops. As if I was in Disneyland searching for the not too big, not too small Mickey Mouse stuffie for my young niece. Any kind of religious item you could think of was available for purchase. Several-liter-size containers to carry water from the grotto to where I wondered. Home? Could you DoorDash the delivery of the water? Rosaries of a size I never would have imagined. For a human the size of a fictional giant (probably for a sculpture)? Or just to incur suffering while you walk up the hills dragging it or transporting it in a wheel barrel?
The weekend we spent in Lourdes coincided with the tradition of a pilgrimage from the French province of Camargue taking place once every two years. The men and women dress in handsewn clothes fashioned in a style from the 1800s. The real spectacle of this pilgrimage is the men riding through town on the province’s famous white horses. One of my not-so-well-thought-out thoughts was how so many horses are transported to Lourdes. The horses reach Lourdes by being ridden there, as they would have, starting with the first pilgrimage from Camargue to Lourdes in the 1800s. The definition of a pilgrimage.
I was at a religious site, but I was also in France. We should have been surrounded by patisserie or boulangerie but we weren’t. I googled where to go and found a couple that were several kilometers away. I decided to go one afternoon while my mom rested from the morning events. What I discovered on the way to one of these patisserie was a whole other world, a different side of Lourdes, the upper town, where the locals shopped. The upper town has a bohemian feel. I don’t know what it is – the architecture, the font on the hotels, the faded colors of the buildings, or the potted palm trees sitting all around (even on a roof).
At one patisserie/boulangerie, a British man, who had noticed my accent, asked where I was from.
“There are boulangerie all over the place,” he said. “You just need to know where to go.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“There’s also a market up ahead.”
I was five minutes too late for the market, but it was proof that Lourdes is a regular European town, one that comes with a castle. The market was closed but there were enough other sins I could commit, like the ones in artisan chocolate shops. The chocolates were inexpensive, but they were delicious. I bought some from one store, and when I passed another, I had to take a look inside that one too. Once inside, well, I couldn’t leave without making a purchase.
Contrasting indulgence with the religious is a constant mental tease in this town. I was on the hunt for the optimal combination of butter and flour baked so you feel like you are eating air, when I came upon one of the most beautiful churches in the upper town, Église Sacré Coeur. I wouldn’t have guessed from the outside – it looked like a regular local European church (you know, not-so-regular), but it was not the same inside. The stain glass windows had been done in a contemporary style, as were the stations of the cross, and the chandeliers were blown glass. A shop keeper in town called it the “art” church.
“What should we eat?” I had texted my French friends when we arrived in Lourdes, which is a bit like a visitor to the USA asking me what they should eat in New Orleans when I live in Los Angeles. Their only suggestion was to eat products from Bigorre, a French Basque province. Bigorre, I would discover, is a province where French jambòn is produced from black pigs.
The ham was so good at lunch one day I said, “I just want that ham for dinner.” I had bought two slices for lunch. It was expensive and I didn’t know if we would like it (7 or 8 euros for two slices). I went back and bought 6 slices for 24 euros. The woman selling the ham played along with my non-existent French by prompting me with French words, like the word for slice, tranche. But I didn’t even get that far. I kept asking for jamón (Spanish) instead of jambòn (French) until another customer helped.
The shop displayed thousands of euros worth of hams on the walls, like a hunter’s trophies. I sent a photo home to my brother and sister-in-law, and asked if this could be a design idea for their home – my brother loves jambòn.
“Don’t tell your brother. He will do it,” my sister-in-law wrote.
“Too late,” I texted back.
I bought some fennel in béchamel, a bottle of wine, and a baguette. I can’t tell you how many baguettes we bought but didn’t finish during our time in France. We adjusted to the status quo, to buy a fresh baguette each time we thought of eating one. You have to throw out the one from lunch by the time it’s dinner (at home we freeze them which is probably equivalent to cutting your spaghetti).
Many of the best restaurants are in hotels in Lourdes. This arrangement makes it easy for pilgrims to participate in their religious events and sustain themselves during their stay. My mother’s French chef friend in the USA made reservations for us at one restaurant, in the Hotel Belfry, across the river in the upper town, where we had duck risotto and turbot. Our server suggested a rosè champagne to go with our first course (foie gras), and for the rest of our trip, my mother asked for champagne to start our dinners.
My mother is in unbelievable shape and then add onto that her age, I already think she’s a miracle. At the end of our trip there, I said, “So many people show up in wheelchairs, and you walked to the grotto.”
Lourdes set our routine for the rest of the trip, churches and food. 2025 was a jubilee year in Roma, where we would pass through La Porta Sancta (the Holy Door) located in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. And along the way were so many other churches and cathedrals we would visit, like the one in Marseille, Notre-Dame de la Garde, high above the city, with a spectacular view of the Mediterranean. You can’t miss the feeling of suspension between heaven and earth.
I convinced myself after Lourdes, that I should be protected from evil, at least for the duration of the trip. And when I look back on my images, images you wouldn’t guess were from Lourdes, I wish I’d had more time there.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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