Inbetween

Late in the day, just as the heat was beginning to wear off I dropped Pablo off at the bus station. Then I drove the ten odd kilometres back to the campsite and read, reclined on a crash pad in the late afternoon sun.

This and similar rituals went on for three days. Early on the fourth day I packed up, said good bye to the nice family that run the camping on the outskirts of Sabiñanago and began my 1050km drive. Money had hit my travel card and I now had the capacity to do so.

I drove through several broad, silty valleys in the lower Pyrenees before the valley my route took me through started heading towards the French border. Before long it started ascending rapidly, making progress in earnest. After a while my way was impeded by a huge traffic jam, brought on by the closure of one side of the tunnel that crosses the main divide of the range and gives passage between France and Spain.

Despite elevation the bite of the sun was only impeded by intermitten cloud. I rolled the windows down, letting the air flow through.

Perhaps ten minutes passed before the light turned green and the cars from the Spanish side began to crawl through like ants, closely following the fifty speed limit, capitulating to the threat of the “control radar”.

I emerged on the French side to find a thick fog, preventing visibility further than ten metres in front. This was a strange experience coupled with the steep, unprotected drop on the southern side of the road. As I got lower the mist thinned, revealing a cold, dreary day in complete contrast to the day I had left behind in Spain.

That night, numerous wrong turns and sketchily narrow country roads later, I camped on the outskirts if Toulouse.

Open road... I saw a lot of this...

There's little to say about the day that followed. I drove twelve odd hours to meet Dan with only a couple of brief stops. I found one particularly nice French city, towered over by a huge bronze statue overlooking an impressive church but I can remember little else of note.

I arrived in Bourg Saint Maurice, a mere stone's throw from the Italian border and a long, long way from Sabiñanago at about 8:30 that night. I snuck up to Dan's tent and tapped the outside. At first he thought it was nothing, calling out initially but putting his headphones back in after no response. I kept tapping and after a minute or so he finally emerged to see what the hell was tapping on his tent. He was pretty surprised to see me, not expecting me to arrive until the following day.

We had a few drinks and spent some time talking to the members of a local metal band that were sharing the campsite. Before we knew it the sun was rising.

Needless to say we didn't do much that day. Dan showed me some of the surrounds and we just chilled out, catching up on what each other had been doing over the last month we spent apart with me in Spain and him in Bourg Saint Maurice paddling.

The next day we headed into town to rent Dan a via Ferrata kit to take on some of the crazy exposed routes fringing the town. And we never made it out.

We got in the car after leaving the shop, excited to venture into the mountains. Then the engine wouldn't turn over. I don't know why this shit always happens to us but it simply does. Five futile minutes of attempting to start it gave way to pushing the car to a nearby garage against the traffic down the town's major street. That in turn gave way to three weeks of complete redundancy, doing almost nothing at all.

Each day we made the twenty minute walk to town and WiFi and more often than not a further fifteen minute walk to the supermarket. After a week or so we bought a slackline and that also became a daily ritual, set up in the park by the river. However that was also soon to end. One day men with chainsaws and excavators turned up out of the blue and felled this once tranquil place of all it's trees, right down to the river side.

Our newest form of entertainment

A small fraction of our beer consumption during our stay

The new discovery; wine strength generic beers

Several times in that three weeks we learned the very definition of despair. After only a week stranded we went to pick up the car at our appointed time only to find out they had misdiagnosed the problem and our actual problem was going to cost 1300 euros to fix. We most certainly weren't going to pay that.

A section of the daily walk to the WiFi Spot

We went to our WiFi spot and deliberated what to do. Move continents? Start travelling by train? We had no idea.

After three days we ordered the part. It could only be shipped to the UK so we sent it through a friend who managed to send it to completely the wrong pace. It was a long two weeks not knowing if the part was even going to work and a period I would really love not to relive. Feeling both the summer and your time abroad recede before your eyes with little you can do about it is far from pleasant.