T-Minus One Week to the Med

La Howdy Again,

We hail from the French ville of Arles-Sur-Tech, which roughly translates to Arles on the Tech, the latter being a river that runs down into Spain and the former being a Roman name not to confused with a town of the same appelation in Provence. It's been a zany, blurry, and beautiful stretch since we last wrote, and to be honest, the scenery and the hike, both of which are frequently breathtaking, are starting to run together. France doesn't like hooking up to our camera, so we'll try to update as best we can with memory.

I had in mind to submit Felice to the last two notable Pyrennean peaks on this half of the range. The first, Pic Carlit, sported a truly intimidating route straight up its western face. Undaunted and fueled primarily by Nutella, Felice cowed the peak in just over an hour with me along for the ride. The reason we were primarily fueled by Nutella is that we were kind of running low on water due to not having a map for a short section. Without a map, we could only guess at where water sources might lie. For most of the trip, we've crossed multiple streams and rivers a day, but this section was very dry, lots of arroyos and dry creek beds. So we kept hoping for a little bit of water, but the sun was setting, we were weary from walking 10ish hours, and we were a little put off by some ferocious Great Pyrenese Sheep Dogs (who had no sheep in sight to guard, but surrounded and barked at us for all their worth anyway), when an enormous wind picked up, and we thought we'd better skedaddle down a canyon for some sleep. Thus--no water, no pasta, no oatmeal (thanks, Mana and Lotte)--Nutella for dinner and breakfast, which is fine with me 'cause I love Nutella. Also, I don't think that Grover could possibly be part Great Pyrenees after meeting these three monsters. The "last" (It's quotation marks like these that worry me.) peak, Canigou, is somewhat renowned in the Catalonian sector and a truly momentous summit, topped by a fun hands-and-feet requiring scramble. It was meant to show us our first look at the Mediterranean, but by the time we summited at 6 in the evening, clouds had filled in its Eastern horizon. I must note that I felt eerily quiet atop this peak, knowing that it spelled the last of our really great ascents. This peak was probably my favorite so far. It was a long climb, 4 1/2 hours, but the last bit was exciting rock-climby, and at the top was a very cool and poetic hand-painted circular map depicting and identifying the sights for the 360° around us. I don't really believe that we're anywhere near the Mediterranean at this point. I haven't seen it from any mountaintops. It think it might be a ruse.

Last night, we found our camp spot (by "our" I mean that it was mentioned in the guide as being a good spot for camping and was the one we circled on our map as our destination for the evening) to be taken by several giant teepees and a handmade structure of woven branches: it was a rainbow gathering. This is interesting because we ran into the American Rainbow Family on our last big trip, our road trip from Santa Fe to Gainesville, FL. (They were in Colorado at a National Park where we'd agreed to meet some friends.) It's a bit of a hippie-fest, and these guys out-hippied me and Ryan by far. (I know that's hard for some of you to believe, but it's true. We felt so awkwardly un-hippie, especially as we'd just talked a bartender at an auberge into letting us take free showers about an hour before the encounter.) Look the Rainbow Family up; they're on Wikipedia, I think. So we camped beyond them and went back to convince them to throw the frisbee with us and to watch them juggle things and to eat slices of their watermelon. Then we returned to our tent a little after dusk and listened to their drum-circle as we fell asleep.

We're just slightly ahead of schedule, but we don't want to be homeless for too long before our flight leaves Barcelona on the 10th, so we're trying to take this last 4 or 5 days even more casually, and we anticipate a black or blueberry patch to settle down in for at least a night. The weather is becoming quite hot and dry, so more midday siestas might be in order, or at least earlier rising times.

So now we hike for two days to a wonderful-but-ugly sounding shopping land where we'll buy groceries at Spanish prices (something like 6% tax instead of 13% in France) and then a few more days to Banyul, the end of the hike, the Mediterranean, our destination of all destinations! Then we will eat a celebratory dinner, drink something celebratory, and sleep in a bed, take showers even. I am pretty ready to be done with the hiking and to get onto the beach for a little while. I'd like to get rid of these hiking-boot tan lines.

Friends and family: thanks for reading. We miss you and are headed back soon. Hope that all is well with you all. We'll try to do another entry in Banyuls around the 4th. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel. Love--Felice