Remember the winds that lifted us up the trail yesterday? That was just a pass away and a few thousand feet higher, but they returned–with a vengeance. At 3a, just after I had made my first trip out for other reasons, they decided to make themselves known. How did they do that? By blowing the tent down–on Pam’s side.
This just started a cascade of stakes coming free. I got back out and tried to anchor everything again. I was able to stabilize the tent by adding more rocks at all the corners and doors, but I was running out of rocks of significant size. I called it stable and went back to bed.
15 minutes later, my side of the tent collapsed. I looked out and the winds had flipped (I’m not kidding here) a 50# rock that was holding my door up. I wanted my side to be solid. This was just the beginning of a nightmare of sleeplessness that went on until PAM finally said “Let’s just get up and hike.” She was tired of laying with the tent on her face. We think we may have gotten a total of 3 hours of sleep.
We were all packed up and ready to go at the respectable “Pete time” of 5:30 but it was too dark for us to risk hiking down the steep grade into Vielle-Aure so we found a rock alcove and had a little breakfast.
When the sun finally decided to join our day, we set off down the trail at 6:30ish. We were in town by 8. The tourist information office doesn’t open until 9 so what would be your first stop?
Next we had a little more breakfast and coffee thinking that we wouldn’t be able to get into a hotel or gite until early afternoon. When the tourist office opened, we were first in the door. We got the location of a hotel, grocery store, and laundromat. We were going to be productive until we could get into a room.
As luck would have it, we got into a room by 9. We showered and then I started laundry while Pam took the first of many naps today.
I tried to wake her up, but was unsuccessful in my attempt, so I took a nap as well. We finally got up mid afternoon, driven by hunger. This is where we made mistake number 1–never go shopping when you are hungry. My pack had just gotten down to a good weight and now I’ll be overwhelmed again tomorrow when we leave town. We did by some snacks to munch on until supper time this evening.
The rest of the day was just a that–a lazy day. We got caught up on blogging and emails. I was surprised by the number of friends wishing for me to keep hiking the GR10 and stay in Europe. I don’t know if it’s wishing me good fortune or thankfulness that I’m gone. Only Sarah told me that our old place was vacant and we could move back in.
I really want to thank Axel and Heike for the encouragement and support. We miss them a lot since they left the trail. Axel had a lot of great suggestions for weight reduction which we are going to start implementing. I did point out to him that I used to weigh almost 280#–I felt terrible the first time I weighed 250# and great the second time. That philosophy works with pack weights, too. A 40# pack doesn’t feel to bad after carrying a 50# one.
Just a beer, dinner, and packing and then we’re all ready for tomorrow to make more trail progress.
