I’ve been experiencing a few biological anomalies lately so I’ve decided to catalog all of the things I’m eating that give me gas so I can avoid these items in the future. Here’s a partial list: apricots, onions, sausage, lentils, pasta, butter, peanut butter, nutella, apples, bread, pork, pizza, and water. The only things that don’t are licorice tea, M&Ms, and snickers–all the things I was told not to eat when I was a kid. Who’s laughing now (certainly not Pam who spends up to 11 hours a night with me in a tent).
2000 up and 2500 down–just like a Cubs/Cardinals matchup with extra innings. Of course the Cubbies win, but that has nothing to do with this. I’m talking about our hiking day. Almost 4500′ of elevation change in a mere 5 miles. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t 2000′ up, straight out of the gite. The first thing we did was drop 50′ to get back to the trail to accentuate the 2000′ climb which we did…in the fog…and rain…and cold…up hill, both ways. (Oops, having some crossover in my misery stories).
Get this, we were the first ones up this morning. We had breakfast with Peter and Alaina. One of the owners had brought fresh bread, jam, butter, and goat cheese in and left it on the table at 6 (and woke us up). Peter and Alaina wanted to leave early today, so they were the first ones downstairs. Once we looked outside and saw the fog and rain, our early breakfast morphed into a leisurely breakfast. We hit the trail at 9.
The trail sign said 2 hours to the top–we took 2 hours and 10 minutes. From the top down to town was 2 hours and 10 minutes–we took 2 hours and 20 minutes. Our guidebook said 2 hours and 50 minutes. Can anyone guess where I’m going with this and the dead guy that wrote our book? I know I’ve kicked that dead horse until it looks like Shakey’s pizza meat (side note to non-Decatur, IL residents–Shakey’s pizza eventually was forced to shut down once the rumor that they used horse meat on their pizzas. This wasn’t true, it was canned cat food).
We were expecting St-Lizier to be a hopping little village because the English family that we met in Fos (Martin, Judith, Mary, and John) had booked a place for 3 nights here. This should be their third night. We thought we might run into them today. If they stayed here more than one night, I have no idea what they did to occupy their time other than watch each other grow thinner out of boredom. There is a gite, restaurant, campground, and shop in town. In true French fashion, the restaurant was closed for lunch (so was the shop).
Pam and I set up our tent in the municipal campsite not too far from Peter and Alaina. We took a nap until the shop reopened at 3:30. We bought a few items for tomorrow and then headed back to the restaurant which was supposed to reopen at 3. When we got there, they had changed the reopening time to 4. We waited around until 4:15 and decided we were to close to Spain. We went back to the shop and bought a couple of cans of lentils and sausage–the French equivalent of franks and beans (see first paragraph of today’s entry).
We also bought a 10 pack of beer which we split with Petter and Alaina. It didn’t take long to see that the beer wasn’t going to be enough. Alaina went and got another bottle of red wine. They had their “frank and beans” and then we finished off the wine. I’m willing to bet we don’t finish the entire 14 miles tomorrow.
