Escape To The Mountains, And Celebrations

August 14, 2022 by libertatemamo 18 Comments

Another week of heat, drought and fires in SW France. The ground is so dry now it’s forgotten the taste of water, and the air is so heavy it’s resting on the horizon like a blanket of dust. We see rain clouds almost daily, but like a biblical story they seem to part and move around us every time they approach. They always approach, but they never deliver.

So close, yet so far….

This is the end of it though, or so they say. The last of the canicule before cooling starts, the absolute last day before it’s all over. It won’t exactly be chilly next week, but it’s going to be less than it has, and at this point I consider anything below 32°C (~90°F) a win.

We’re all ready for the change, eager to break out of our house-cages and into the outer world. In fact I was going stir-crazy on Monday, so ready to bust out into Hulk-mode-Nina that when our old RV friends @the_scenicroute indicated they were in the area and at higher ground it took all of two seconds to decide to pack up LMB and join them.

Escape!! It turned out to be exactly that, and exactly what we needed!

But that’s not all that happened this week either. A certain handsome gentleman celebrated another orbit around the sun and I took a tumble that sent me to the ER. But hey, that’s all in a weeks adventures in rural SW France, right?

Escape, Oh To Escape

Sometimes friends are the only escape we have from ourselves, Atticus

Humans are an odd species sometimes, and I include myself in that description. Despite almost a lifetime of travel and what I’d deem a fairly “free-spirit”, I’m still prone to routine and habit. House-living, as we’ve now done for 4 {{gasp}} years only adds to that inclination. Perhaps it’s the comfort or just the ease of it all, but for whatever reason we don’t get to the Pyrénées mountains nearly as often as we should…..and yet they are right there!

So I thank the travel Gods for roving friends, Iain and Kate, who once lived and RV’d in a snazzy airstream back in the USA but decided to move to Europe several years ago and brought their travel bug with them. They now reside officially in Spain, but spend a good portion of their time motorhome traveling and (very recently) vann’ing it in their spankin’ new, snazzy van.

They were already in the Pyrénées when we started texting each other

“It’s beautiful here” they said “and cool”

OOOOOo…..What kind of temps?

“Low 20’s” Kate texted back “with a high of 24”

“Heavenly” I replied “see you tomorrow”

So as our area headed into the absolute hottest week we’ve ever seen, we zoomed off just ~2 hours south to the mountain town of Égat, France into a lovely, shaded campground (Camping Les Clotes) at around 1,800 m (~5,900 ft) of elevation. We arrived to simply perfect weather, unloaded our camping chairs and enjoyed the first comfortable afternoon outside we’ve had in months.

Peace, cool temps, outdoors and friends….what more could you want in life?

The next few days were just a total chillax session. We hiked in the mountains around camp (literally hundreds of miles of trails in this area, which we explored thanks to the very handy Wikiloc hiking app), drank beer (we even bought some of Paul’s homebrew with us!), ate food and napped/read when the afternoon thunderstorms rolled through (which they did each day). Just a perfect coupla nights away.

Now, why don’t we do this more often? Back to that human thing again, I guess….

Then We Baked

We got home just in time for the hottest day of the year, a necessity really as we’d planned a birthday celebration for a certain young man that night, but oh my did we bake. This is the fourth canicule we’ve had this year and the most brutal of all. The heat has been relentless and unforgiving and the ground so dry it seems you could set it alight just by thinking about it.

The latter has been particularly worrying.

This past week saw another massive blaze start in Gironde (close to the area that was hit last month) just south of Bordeaux with over 8,000 people evacuated and more than 1,000 firemen on the scene. And there are at least 50 other smaller fires active all around the country. Rains came yesterday to that area which helped contain some of the worst, but we’ll need much more water before things calm down again and the firefighters can relax.

We’ve been lucky here, so very lucky (cross fingers, toes and touch all wood).

Despite the heat and drought, the fires have not come close to our location and our air has been free of smoke. Oh, and we still have water….thank goodness. Gotta be grateful for that, and just hope for the weather to change….SOON!

And We Celebrated

On the very hottest day, the day to beat all records and melt all things, we celebrated Paul’s birthday.

This was pre-planned of course, the birthday thing not the whole “doing it in an oven” part, but such is life sometimes. And in these situations you just have to go with the flow.

So as temps peaked to ~40°C (~104°F) we headed out of our air-conditioned house-caves to a local Belgian beer-bar in a small town just 25 mins away. Le Garage is a laid-back spot with a distinctly Route 66 vibe created by a well-known local garagiste (mechanic) as part of his retirement dream some years ago. He’s there every night of course, a large man with a grey beard, a booming voice and an equally big personality, “Living the dream” as my Camino friend Jessica would say. And his bar is awesome, albeit not air-conditioned.

Despite this, over 10 of our local friends braved the sweltering heat to join us, sweating buckets and downing beer into the late hours of the evening until temps dropped blissfully below 30°C.

We chatted about life, fanned ourselves like fainting butterflies and basically just had an awesome time. The whole thing was a deal too, as the bar was closing for Aug vacay the very next day so all the beer barrels had to be empty that night. Two for one all evening, with a few freebies thrown in at the very last hour. A cool end to a very, very hot day.

And once again, friends helped us escape ourselves….

Finally, We Wait

It’s Sunday afternoon and we’re waiting…..

Waiting for the end of the canicule (today is supposedly the last day!), waiting for rain that is ever-forecasted (but never seems to come), waiting for what comes next. Oh, and I’m waiting to walk properly again, the result of a rather silly tumble I took a few days after we came back from the mountains.

Another classic Nina tale…

I find it amazing (even to myself) that I can somehow manage to walk 800km across three mountain ranges in Spain without twisting my ankle, yet achieve the near-impossible of twisting it so badly that I have to go to the ER by executing a most spectacular fall just 100m from our house.

How is that even possible?

All I can say is this….one minute I was chatting to the neighbors (very cute) dog and the next I was splayed out on the asphalt in so much pain I didn’t know if I could get up again. A drive to the Urgences, X-Rays and two hours later I came home with an ankle brace, a physio prescription and a stern warning to take it easy for at least two weeks. Twooooo weeeeeeks…..seriously Nina {ugh}!!

So yes, we’re waiting. For the heat to wane, for rain to come and for me to heal. Let’s hope all three things come to pass by next week’s blog.