When we checked into the hotel last night, it was clear to the owners that my wife had a clear case of “Snicker-lust.” Walking into the bar/lobby that was the first thing she noticed. It was too apparent when she pulled me down, whispered in my ear (actually a whisper yell, “I want those Snickers”). I tried to appease her by buying two, but when she kicked me in the back walking to the stairway, she had clearly revealed her hand to the owners.
As soon as we were in bed for the night, I heard the sound of a hole saw and drill–they were taking no chances with this one. They installed a new lock between the rooms and bar to prevent any late night Snicker-walking. Sure enough, when I woke up to pee at 3, Pam got out her spork and told me “Go get those Snickers.” I was afraid to go back to the room empty handed, so I took a FULL pepper shaker (if you’ve got to steal, steal big). She slapped it out of my hand and said “If you’ve got a job to do, just do it yourself” and stormed out of the room. 5 minutes later she came back empty handed and told me to sleep on the floor. That was much better than other times when she has been foiled in one of her sprees.
Getting up in the morning, we had breakfast with the only other hotel guest, a retired man from Belgium. Breakfast wasn’t much–just a croissant, a piece of bread, one pad of butter each, coffee, and orange juice. No hotel staff present and nothing to steal. I could tell she was going to be in a fowl mood all day.
For the most part today, the trail was on road and forest track. It wasn’t particularly rough, but it was a tad warm. We only had a 700′ climb on the roads, so hopefully she would calm down with the easy walk. When we got to the top of the climb, we saw men with shotguns. They motioned us to travel fast and keep quiet, which we did. Surprisingly, the appearance of firearms turns Pam into a scared little girl–she can’t get away from them fast enough.
When we got to an intersection with a side road and the GR10, there was a French man standing guard there experiencing, what I like to call, “The Barney Fife” effect. Give a man a gun and a colored vest and now he’s an authority figure, especially once he pulls that bullet out of his shirt pocket. He kept telling us to turn left when I wanted to go straight. Pam just took off running down the left turn so I had to follow. I got her to slow down long enough to convince her we were screwed if we went this way because we didn’t have a map or even an idea of where we were. I got her to return to the intersection to only have Barney get more agitated. I wanted to wait until someone who spoke English came along, but Pam was down the road once again.
Occasionally, I assert, and maybe even, over-assert myself when I’m thrown out of my OCD comfort zone. This was one of those times. We had a nice “discussion” and I took off walking fast down the road hoping to meet someone speaking English. A mile and a half later, I met a French couple heading up where we had just been forced to leave. They showed me the convoluted route we would have to take to avoid the one day wild pig hunt in progress above. As we were looking over the map, a vehicle came down from above and told us we could walk the road through the hunt. I was a bit peeved.
Bottom line, we walked an extra 3 miles total to end up at the same intersection we were at an hour and a half before. Barney was gone, but we had burned up time and energy. We clearly were not going to be able to make it to where we wanted to tonight. Hello another extra day on the GR10. Assuming no more incidents, we will finish on Friday, September 15. We’ve got to get hold of the French Federation of Professional Hikers (FFoPH) of “FoFF” because they wished to give us a special award when we made it to Banyuls. At the last refuge we stayed at, we had given them our tentative arrival date as 14-09-17.
We still made pretty good time (for us) and went past the old Roman ruins and Fort de Bellegarde on our way into Le Perthus. We wanted to just pick up a few groceries and go on, but both of our feet (four feet in total) were shot. We didn’t even pretend to agonize over the decision, we just got a hotel and dropped our packs. We did do our grocery shopping (1/2# of M&Ms, cokes, popcorn, and Oreos–never too much junk food on the trail).
After a nap, we went back out to grab some supper. Le Perthus is on the border between Spain and France. Actually, it is the border between Spain and France. We are staying in France, but Spain is the next building. Over 20,000 people/day come to town to shop but only 542 live here. Everywhere else in France, you can’t even think about getting food until 7:30. Here, everything closes at 7. We left our hotel at 6:55 to get supper.
We found the only open bar in town. It was actually a really nice place and everyone was very friendly. Our waiter, Adria, was a nice young man who had spent a month in Central America just last year. He told us we were the first Americans that had ever visited the Bar. We talked about his experience in Honduras, Panama, and Salvador (we had been to Honduras earlier this year).
The guys at the table next to us heard us talking. One of the guys spoke excellent English even though he thought he didn’t. One thing everyone was clear upon, they didn’t want to be presented as French or Spanish, but as Catalonian. I’m not exactly clear on the history of the area and I need to check this out, but Catalan is an ancient Nation that extended from South of Barcelona all the way up to North of where we currently are in France and west almost to Andorra. I think there are almost 10 million people who consider themselves Catalonian first and they have their own language. In fact, almost all the signs in this area are in French and Catalan (and I apologize if I am getting any facts incorrect of misspelling names). All of the people we met tonight spoke anywhere from 2 to 4 languages and were very knowledgeable about the USA.
We sat and talked with them for well over an hour about the beauty of the area, sports, history of the US, Trump (surprisingly, not well liked universally here–that’s a joke, it wasn’t a surprise at all), and travel. We had a great time and meeting new people is one of the primary reasons we like to travel. I just wish we could skip out on the Barney Fifes of the world and could speak more than just English. Thanks to everyone for an enjoyable supper.
