After a delightful evening at camp last night, the winds picked up. Even with a protective rock wall the wind whipped the tent around. I woke up a couple times to tighten the lines here and there, but the fact is all tents will make noise in strong enough winds, so although I could make it less noisy, it wasn’t going to get quiet. We were again in the clouds and then out again. stars then fog and later moonlight. A few minutes of sleep then awakened by winds blowing again.
Sometime after 1 AM I managed to fall into a decent sleep. I think Betty wasn’t as lucky as was up most of the night.
I woke up around 7 to some nice sunrise colors, I let Betty sleep a little longer, but eventually it was too beautiful with the warm morning light and clouds in the valley below. We had another pancake day, this time Apple cinnamon with cranberries and almond flour (almond flour in addition to regular, not a substitution).
that’s me taking pictures
We packed up and got going late, I think after 9, I wasn’t worried about it, we were basically just headed back to the car. The forecast (from a couple days earlier) said it was going to be a rainy day, but instead it was beautiful and clear. We stopped at a lake that was just slightly off the path and had a snack.
We stopped at the refuge half way and had a coffee and a baclava, from there we looked the route we attempted the day before and speculated it was likely that we saved ourselves a headache by turning back as then path from far away appeared to get more sketchy not less around the corner from where we bailed.
The wind picked up and some clouds covered the sun and suddenly it wasn’t so warm sitting outside so we moved on. Soon enough the sun was back and as we climbed down and the day went on and the wind was blocked more and more it became a hot day!
When we got got the car the first priority was getting petrol, then figuring out where we were headed next.
I had another hike in mind, but after looking into it we found out it’s in a National park and can’t be camped in, and refuge reservations are mandatory. So we headed back in the direction of Cauterets, where we have some other ideas for the next couple days. We got into Lourdes after 7, checked into our hotel. The hotel has a Kitchenette, so we headed off to the grocery store to pick up groceries so I could cook. They closed right before we got there. Ok fine, so we drove back to the hotel and dropped off the car (parking in town was difficult, the grocery store was slightly out of town) and headed out to the Indian place we had last time which was amazing. We tried calling in our order but got a message in French 🤷♂️.
We walked there and placed and order, then picked up a coupe things from a market before heading back got the hotel. When we got there it was about 8:45 and reception was closed… guess who didn’t take a picture of the front door code? I really thought that it would have been fine if we were back before 9. There was a number listed for emergencies, so I called… apparently we were not the first to have that happen, they were friendly and gave us the door code to get into the building. We ate dinner and showered and off to bed. It started raining just after we got back to the hotel, excellent planning! We joke that we won’t get rained on again on this trip, now that we spend a bunch of money on rain gear.
* phone cameras have come amazingly far, many of the images Betty is getting on her iPhone 12 mini look just as good and sometimes even better than the unedited images from my Sony A7iii (I won’t be able to edit my images until I get to a computer, modern phones do automatic editing when you take the picture and it’s really great for most situations). The dynamic range of the images is much improved compared to my iPhone X, and the colors In sunsets and sunrises are much more accurate. Phones still don’t replace cameras for serious shooters, but for the average person, getting a gigantic camera is just not worth the effort like it used to be.