Happy 7 month anniversary to my lovely wife. Today, she became the leader I always knew she could be. If it wasn’t for her, I would have stopped to camp several miles earlier than we did. I was dragging from the minute we woke up. If she would have said “Why don’t we take another day,” I would have been back in bed before she could have said “off.”
It’s always hard to leave Seix, but I knew we had to go. We saw kayakers already running the river as we were heading out. At what ungodly hour must they get up to already be in town at 9:30? There were all kinds of people out and about. Pam took a wrong turn on the edge of town. The turn was into a private drive and she did it in front of a large tour group. They understood enough to see that my wife is directionally challenged.
The trail today was a nice gradual climb up. The Ariege has a bad reputation as being difficult. We have actually found it to have the best maintained trails with proper switchbacks on the trails. Other areas play with switchbacks, but this district has properly implemented them in the trails.
We went four miles before our first break. While we were finishing up our fruit, the Australian couple from Tasmania that we met on Tuesday caught up with us. They sat down for their second breakfast and we chatted for a bit. Peter and Alaina are doing the entire GR10 as well but they started about 10 days later that we did so we probably won’t be hiking with them for too long before they leave us behind.
We are all heading to the same spot tonight, Cabane d’Aula just before the pass. They had also taken a day off in Seix and decided to break the 17.5 mile recommended day into 2 days. Even doing this, we still get to climb almost 3500′. They did give me one bad piece of news: the writer of the guidebook I’ve been complaining about died a couple years ago. I feel guilty now about criticizing his terrible book with crappy directions and a total lack of information about the country we are passing through. IF he were still alive, I would relish complaining about the worthless book I bought. The only consolation I have is that Alaina has the same book and agrees with me–it’s total crap.
We hiked with them for a few minutes after the break, but I just felt like poo today. I couldn’t walk 10 steps without having to catch my breath and wipe sweat out of my eyes. It was a pleasant 70F; a near ideal day for hiking even if the humidity was a little high. It must be a combination of lack of sleep last night from water dripping and roosters crowing from about 3a. Maybe I overloaded my pack again with fresh fruits and cheeses, but backpacking friendly foods are hard to find here. We had to keep stopping to cool off, catch my breath, soak my feet, eat, etc. Pam even accused me of procrastinating.
With the lousy maps and schematics in the guidebook by the dead guy who I will no longer criticize, we couldn’t figure out where we were at all today. As usual, we follow the trail markers because the book sucks and is usually wrong. It didn’t even mention the huge cascaded water fall less that 1/4 mile off the trail. Luckily, this is a very popular day hike for locals, so they pointed it out to us.
We eventually made the climb up to the Cabane, but decided to camp rather than stay in it after we looked inside. We looked around for camping spots and found lots of level areas. We ended up camping about 50 yards from Peter and Alaina. While we were setting up our tent, we got overrun with cows. Peter chased them away for us.
We made dinner which should help my pack weight tomorrow–pasta with tomato sauce (in a can), an avocado, and two boxes of red wine (a touch of class on the trail–who would have thought that red wine out of a juice box wouldn’t be that great?). While we were finishing up, Peter and Alaina came over and we talked some more. Peter has done a lot of hiking in France so he was sharing some of his experiences on the GR 5. He had a scare a few years back when he was misdiagnosed with leukemia and was only given 3 years to live. He ended up having a treatable disease but it did change his outlook on life. As a result, they think we are doing the right thing by getting out now while we can.
Tonight was one of the latest nights we have actually stayed up while hiking. Pam didn’t get under her quilt until 10p. My guess is that she’ll be dragging more than me tomorrow–conditions will return to normal.
