Day 18–Monday, July 17. A little shy of Borce, France (7 miles)

First off, Happy 6 month Anniversary to my lovely wife–I’m enjoying the honeymoon so far

We knew from the beginning we were going to get an anti-Pete start–that is, late. We were completely out of food (with the exception of teas, coffees, and sports drink mixes–I’m carrying about 3# of those). The campground came alive before I could convince Pam to be a leader and get up.

Since the grocery store was back in my favorite village (Lescun, in case anyone forgot), we decided to just leave our tent set up while we went shopping. If we packed up before, we would just have to repack everything when we got back with the groceries. This saved us about 15 minutes of time so we could get in town when the store opened. I’ll own this one–when we moved our tent yesterday, we moved it right next to Yvo and Annieka. We really like this young family. As we were heading out, I started talking to them about all of their travels. Then we started talking gear. When they got to looking at my tent, time flew out the window. Yada, yada, yada, we got on the road at 11:20.

Just as we left the campground, it started to rain. This was actually a good thing since we had some climbing to do. All in all, the trail wasn’t that bad today, but we just couldn’t get into a hiking rhythm. We only had a 600′ climb in the first mile and then we had a fairly level walk for a couple of miles. Pam was not feeling well so she was very slow. After 4 hours of hiking she wanted to take a nap. We were back to the old discussion of sleep vs food.

Breakfast was just yogurt, cheese, bread, juice, and coffee. My contention is that we burned that little bit of fuel off walking back from the store to the campground (1/2 mile, 450′ of elevation change). We went to bed last night before 10 and slept good, but we didn’t eat supper because someone was whiny and wanted to get back to camp to go to bed early. There was no sleep deficit, but there was a big caloric deficit.

Instead of sleeping, I made us lunch and then we napped. I’m always willing to relive my kindergarten year. The siesta was one of my favorite aspects of Spain. After the long break, Pam felt better, but she won’t admit it. She did eat almost as much as me (just one chorizo stick less).

We had one big climb of about 1900′ and we were only a little over half way through it when we had our lunch/nappy time. The final part of any climb is always the steepest, so the energy gains from the food were cancelled by the steep trail so Pam is wanting sleep.

The pass came sooner than I expected. I rounded a corner and saw a picture of a Great Pyrenees and a cartoon explaining that these are working guard dogs protecting their flocks. Respect them and don’t annoy them. I’ve had 6 Great Pyrenees but have never seen one work yet. I was excited to see them in action. Too bad the flock was on the next mountain–we could see the sheep but couldn’t pick out the dogs.

This is when we discovered something very cool. Pam was wanting to listen to music to keep her mind off of her misery. Instead of getting out her MP3 player she used her phone. I thought, lets check for networks just in case. No wifi available, but there were several blue tooth devices.

 

Before I continue with this story, I’ve got to mention that all the animals free graze in the mountains and that they all are either tagged or marked with paint to identify the owners, but every horse, cow, sheep, goat, donkey, pig, you name it, wears a cow bell. The bells all have different tones. When you happen upon a group of animals grazing, it sounds like the percussion section of a high school marching band warming up. The next time Christopher Wallken says “we need more cow bell,” send him to the Pyrenees.

I connected the blue tooth on her phone to “sheep.” Nothing happened. She took her phone back and hit the play button. The bells on the sheep started playing the song she was listening to. It was amazing. I guess they have shock collars on the sheep’s bells to make them shake in time with the music.

There were other networks as well. After experimentation, we discovered “horse” does the best country music interpretation. “Sheep” is best for love songs and bubble gum rock. “Pigs” is all hard rock. The next time anyone is traveling out west in the USA, check this out. I’m not sure if this is just a French thing or if all ranchers have wired up the herds.

After the music experience, we stopped in a cow field to listen to some top 40 while we soaked our feet in a cool stream. But now it was almost 5 and we had killed enough time listening to flock music–Pam wanted to camp. The first level spot we came to in the woods close to a stream, we took.

I set up the tent, filtered water, and cooked supper. I’m not sure what Pam did other than inflate the mattress and spread out her bedding. I heard some weird animal noise coming from the tent, but I was too busy with all my domestic chores to investigate.

We were in the tent by 8:15 to avoid the mosquitos. Pam was asleep and snoring a few minutes after that. I still had work to do. A husband’s work never ends.