Camping

This past weekend was another camping adventure. With another couple from Toulouse, we drove down to St Girons in Ariège, and then took some narrow mountain roads through little villages to the parking lot at the end of the road where our hike started. The drive was really pretty and the little towns looked so picturesque I felt like living in one of them. But after a year and a half in Foix I know that it'd be pretty crappy. But still, little boulangeries artisanals, pappys with their berrets, and old stone houses just seem so lovely.

The friends we went hiking with had a book with hikes in the Pyrénées, which was where they got the idea for our trip. We would follow one trail up to a lake on Saturday, camp overnight, then go a short distance without a trail until we picked up a second path to another lake, then hike down. Connecting two official paths with the hors-piste in the middle allowed us to go in a circle and not just hike down the same way we came up. The mountains we were in also formed a dead-end, so we hiked up on side of the U, then over to the other side of the valley, then back down, comig back to the parking lot on the opposite side of our departure.

This was of course just the plan.

Some things we didn't plan on:
-the fact that camping above the tree line means no wood for your campfire (and the woody bushes only provided a few minutes of flames when we broke off branches)
-when the guide says the trail is "mineralogique" that means rocks, boulders, and more boulders to climb over (and did I mention some more rocks?)
-that it would be so dang cold at night! I slept in leggings, socks, t-shirt, and fleece sweater in my sleeping bag and I barely got a wink because I was so cold
-that the rock piles that were supposed to guide us to the second lake would be relatively non-existant, which lead to us roaming around the side of a mountain for more than an hour (wondering if we were lost) before we found the right trail. This of course could have been avoided if we'd brought an IGN map, which was entirely our fault for not having purchased
-our friend Pierre slipping and falling while we were lost and briefly dislocating his shoulder (it went back into place which meant that it hurt but he could still use his arm; he finished the hike with his arm held against his side as though it were in a sling)

But we did get some things right:
-the Zip and lighters we brought to start the camp fire. Zip are squares of mashed cardboard that burn really easily, so you set one on fire and put it under your wood (or twigs, as the case was for us)
-extra t-shirts and socks and pants for B which meant we didn't have to stay too long in a sweat-soaked t-shirt
-big sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and lots of granola bars. We each used an entire baguette to make sandwiches, and I didn't even finish all of mine

All in all, the hiking-camping weekend was good. I sat down on some ants and got bit on my butt. We played Shabadaba and had "boire" as a word and Pierre got to use all the drinking songs he new. Seeing the valley and the plain in the distance, surrounded by the mountains, is really really beautiful. We crossed lots and lots of slugs on the trail. And today we all have sore muscles to remind us of the 1000 meters we hiked up, and then back down.