Day 23–Saturday, July 22. Gourette (4 miles)

We finally made it. It only took us 3 days to do what the guidebook says we can do in one. Clearly, the guidebook continues to over estimate us.

It rained throughout the night with heavy winds on and off. Even this morning when PAM was the leader and got up at 8 it was very windy with a slight mist. I boiled water for our coffee while she “straightened up the tent”–at least I didn’t hear any snoring while she was “working.” We ate our meager breakfast in the tent while the winds intermittently howled. We even packed up completely inside before coming out meaning it only took us about another five minutes to fold up the tent and hit the trail by 9:30.

It was only a 2400′ drop down to Gourette so it shouldn’t take us more than 2 hours by our estimate to get there. The book says an hour, so we are just doubling all the times from here on out and we find that to be pretty accurate.

It started out the same as yesterday ended–lots of rock scrambling with lots of different path options. I don’t think I mentioned this, but yesterday as we were descending from the pass, we took a 15 minute break to have the last of our planned snacks for the day. It had taken us about 45 minutes to descend where we were. While we were resting, a French runner and his dog passed us up heading to the pass. He passed us again on his way back down before we reached the lake where we camped. Maybe we are over cautious, but we just can’t afford an injury when we are out of country for 8 months.

Since it was a Saturday and starting to clear up, there were a lot of people out day hiking. We probably passed 50 people heading to the lake. I’m so glad we camped there last night even with the rain.

This being a new valley to us, there are lots of new features for us to see and photograph. There were even a couple of climbers going up a vertical wall (and Pam says I take risks!). We’re putting all of our hopes on Arrens-Marsous which we will get to tomorrow. But tomorrow is Sunday so we probably will have to wait until Monday morning to do our shopping and find money. We just hope that we can get enough supplies in Gourette to get us to Arrens.

As soon as we hit town, we headed to the Tourist Information Center which has never let us down. The guidebook didn’t paint an optimistic picture of town for us, but in an ideal situation, we would find an ATM, a market for food, a public water closet, and a restaurant with wifi. We got them all, plus.

We initially tried to use the wifi at the tourist office, but it limited us to 20 minutes so we found another crepe shop on the way out of town that had good wifi. We were her only customers for a couple of hours so she took real good care of us. As far as food goes, we got enough to last us for 3 days because we can’t really believe the guidebook when it says stores are available. We’ve also given up on getting hiker friendly supplies–I’m actually carrying a glass jar of Nutella. We got everything we wanted except for M&Ms, peanut butter, and ziplock bags.

We sat at the crepe shop for almost 4 hours while we uploaded blog entries, etc. By the time we got done, it was almost 7 and the fog had rolled in again. Pam said she didn’t really want to hike (now that we had had two small beers) so we thought we’d check out the refuge to see if there were any beds left. Club Alpine Francis is a little old and rough on the edges, but they had plenty of space left. We got a 4 bed room to ourselves. A bonus shower with all the other good luck we’ve had today and we’re back on track.

We realize the rate we are going, one of our shorter trail may be jeopardized, but we are going to do the whole GR10 no matter how much whining, crying, complaining, and screaming are involved. I’ll even tolerate some of Pam doing the same.

We’re freshly showered, stomachs still pretty full from lunch so we’ll just have some chocolate pudding and caramel corn for supper (the refuge had a scale and I’ve lost more than 25# and Pam has lost more than 15# so we can continue to eat like crap on occasion). We are going to try the Pete approach to hiking and be on the trail before 9 (baby steps at first).