First off, Happy 12th Anniversary to Axel and Heike (or possibly belated anniversary, I’m not sure which day it is; but they won’t read this for two weeks, so belated it is).
I stayed up a little later than Pam last night so I could talk with Axel and Heike. They were telling me about a film that was popular in Germany a few years back about the Camino which might explain why so many Germans were on the trail. I was still in bed before dark while they stayed up and had a beer.
Axel and Heike are not morning go getters either. Pam and I were beat from yestrerday’s hike so we slept in past 8:30–we were still the first ones up, but not by much. They may have been laying in bed waiting for us to get up first while we were waiting for them to get up first–if we had played it right, we could have ended up with another day in the tent.
As usual, I cooked breakfast and made coffee while Pam “packed up” inside the tent. I always let her get her stuff done inside before I move my stuff in or out–it just works to stay out of her way. We hit the trail a few minutes before 10. Axel and Heike were still packing up, but we figured they would catch up in a few minutes since we’re such slow hikers.
We didn’t hike as high up as we thought we had last night. We started with a gradual 300′ climb which we thought w were done with. When we left camp, the clouds were well above us, but as we walked and climbed, we got back in the clouds. Who knew walking in a cloud would be so humid?
When we got to the 1000m plateau, visibility was almost zero so we took a break. It didn’t take long for the clouds to rise up above us again and give us good views of the valley we had just climbed out of. It looked like the clouds were finally going to burn off completely for us.
We had another 600′ climb where we ended up in the clouds agin. I guess the clouds got tired of the cat and mouse game and decided to just stay put. This was very disappointing because we had a 3 mile walk on the edge of the gorge and we couldn’t see anything at all except the clouds all around us.
We still had another 500′ to climb so we thought we might get lucky and climb into some sunshine–it just wasn’t to be for us today. As we approached the summit, we met a young French man, David, who we walked with for about an hour. He is a banker in Bordeaux who took a 6 month leave to hike the Camino and GR10,but now he has the hiking bug and says it would take him 6 years to do all the hiking he would like to do.
We eventually split up with us hiking ahead while David took a break. That’s when we met a French woman, Sabrina, who came to our aid several times later in the day. We just barely talked with her before we had to take a break from all the downhill hiking we had done–2500′ without a break–my hip flexors were shot. Pam can fly on the downhills.
When we got to the low point of the day, we ran into Sabrina again at a roadside stand next to the tourist entrance to the gorge. She interpreted for us about restaurants and grocery stores in the area–not looking good, but we\have a few things to try ahead.
We had less than 2 miles to go to Ste-Engrace and hopefully a restaurant. We will hit a shop tomorrow, but we are\ almost out of food and need at least one meals worth to make it. The GR10 is remarkably well marked–most of the time we don’t even have to look at the map. This evening, we ended up on a variant trail into town. We were slightly confused as to the route when Sabrina showed up and agreed with Pam as to the route, I had walked ahead and gotten freaked out by a bunch of skeletons littering the trail–I was convinced a large predator or an angry French farmer who didn’t like hikers was close by.
We ended up at the gite, but they only serve hot meals to people staying there so we were out of luck for food. We were bummed and slightly worried. We decided to check out the church since we were in town. When we came out the waitress came over to talk to us and said we could get some sandwiches if we wanted that instead of a hot meal. That sounded great to us–enough so that we got beers as well. They even gave us 5 liters of cold eaux (see how easily I slipped into French–that’s water).
On our way to find a place to camp, Axel and Heike walked into town. They looked hungry and tired and were headed for the place we just left. Since he speaks French, I’m sure they will fare much better than we did–we are just having a hard time making ourselves be understood.
We headed out of town and saw Sabrina setting up her tent in a field. She invited us to join her but we wanted to head up the trail a bit. As soon as we got on the trail, it started climbing steeply up and flat spots looked scarce. And that’s how we came to be neighbors with Sabrina tonight.