12. apprendre à partager

Keeping up with Kilian Jornet 

We are settling into something of a rhythm. We are being shouted at less in swimming pools, and are becoming more accustomed to the simplest of tasks being associated with vast amounts of bureaucracy.

We spent a couple of days preparing for Rosie's parents' (Peter and Allison’s) visit after mostly neglecting our house during the heatwave. We spent a couple of afternoons gardening, which involved hacking at the spiky, nettle-y vegetation and unearthing some 200 year old pavement. We then tried to plant some grass seed, which was instantly consumed by huge numbers of ants. The house, it seems, is reluctant to be tamed.

We don't yet have a car, relying on our bikes and an electric car share scheme to get around. The cars can be picked up at any time, rented by the minute but cannot generally be booked in advance.
This set of rules encourages you to drive to a place and release the car back to the system, but it gets you some looks. Our last shopping visit involved consecutive trips to a garden center, hypermarket and, slightly embarrassingly, McDonald's in the same trip - piling gardening equipment, toys, bedding and a baby into the same shopping cart as we walked into a fast-food joint. I'm slightly surprised nobody called the police.

(An aside, we've decided it's ok to go to McDonald's in France, after a decade of being middle-class snobbish about it in America - they have espresso served in cups now, and huge play areas where it's seemingly impossible for a toddler to injure itself - it's unbelievably relaxing).

We left the car share EV near our house the night before Peter and Allison arrived, feeling relatively confident that we would be able to pick it up in the morning to get them from the airport. I checked the app, noting that the car was still there with an hour to spare an feeling smug about my idealistic electric car share existence.

My smugness evaporated when I went to collect the car, the sensibly sized Renault Zoé having been replaced with a 2 seater Smart EV, involving a fox-chicken-grain logic puzzle of driving around the Smart car to find a slightly larger car which could carry Rosie and the baby, which itself was used to find a car which could also carry the parents.

After moving the baby seat between cars for the fourth time in a 90 minute period, Rosie was failing to see the magic of the car share scheme and rather forcefully suggested we should just buy a car.

A walk in the park 

Peter and Allison successfully arrived and we spent a mellow day riding bikes on the canal and hanging out in coffee shops, abruptly changing course when Peter cut his legs at the swimming pool.
Though the cuts were serious enough to merit some attention, the system went into full panic mode - with Peter surrounded by an uncountable number of lifeguards, who seemed to mostly be not communicating with each other and occasionally confirming blindingly obvious things with us

“il mal a la jambe?”

Indeed. That would explain the blood.

Eventually, an ambulance turned up to take him to a hospital, along with 5 policemen (they always come in 5s), because, you know, there might be some crime. I rode home with Sam while Rosie and Alison spent 3 hours reading the newspaper in the hospital waiting room.

The local newspaper, incidentally, is hilariously provincial for a city of 2 million people, the last issue containing stories on where local officials had gone on holiday, a visit of a scout group to museum, with a main headline that there continue to be bears in Pyrenees.

Yesterday we decamped to the mountains, a 150km trip which, excitingly, can now be done in an EV (albeit if one brings a very long extension cord). Our accommodation for the weekend was an Airbnb in Aragnouet - a village in the mountains close to the Spanish border in the Midi-Pyrenees - and far enough in for nobody’s phone to work. Having realized that we had collectively forgotten to write down the code for the cottage, we went into the one bar in the village to plead for internet.

The lady behind the bar behaved in a way that’s becoming something of a trend. On the first visit, she was pretty frosty - we couldn’t use the internet, but she’d call the owners - and only after I’d moved the car. The owners didn’t answer, so she grudgingly gave us the wifi code.

The next day, however, when we returned to pick up the bread order, was a completely different story, the misdemeanors of the previous day forgotten we were greeted as old friends. It’s jarringly different to America - where service is warm, but they often forget you the moment you walk out of the door.
We spent the weekend mostly not reaching the top of mountains (the above being the exception), for a couple of reasons. Firstly - although the absolute height above sea level of the mountains is not comparable to Colorado, they are hard - steep and high above the valleys, often with poorly defined tracks. I found myself repeatedly running about 800m vertical, arriving, exhausted, to the Haute Route Pyrenees - a course which now seems impossible to even think about attempting.

Not yet... 

 Secondly - the weather - whereas Colorado has impressive storms and extremes, you don’t feel like you’re inside the weather quite like this. The mountains form clouds as their usual state of being, wrapping around the high peaks as the wind blows from a predictable direction - hiding details which make it feel like the mountains are playing with you, waiting until you are ready.Sam, meanwhile, has been enormously enjoying the doubling of the number of people paying attention to him, while we have been enjoying a week of being able to cook, exercise and sleep properly for the first time in a year and a half.

Sam and Grandpa