It could be Colorado. The view from our campsite is a high plain at about 4000ft, the twinkling lights of a small town and a cascading skyline of peaks beyond, lumbering and massive with the familiar horizontal grading of vegetation transitions from agriculture to forest to the desert of the high alpine. We're escaping the heat of the city in the village of Enveitg - a tiny intersection of worlds, with a few trains a day leaving for Paris, Barcelona and along the eastern flank of the Pyrenees to Perpignan.
We reached a cafe - a nice benefit of hiking here is there are cakes as motivational targets, plus you can feel smug compared to the people who’ve just driven there. Sam duly terrorized the servers for following hour, so we left a big tip and sat on the side of the lake, surrounded by huge peaks, where Sam could joyfully expend his excess energy by throwing rocks in the water.
I set off on my bike this morning to spend a couple of hours in a cafe addressing my increasingly intimidating unread email inbox. The nearest town is Puigcerda - an old walled city perched on a hill on the Spanish border. Though the crossing is imperceptible apart from the change in language of the road signs, the cultural border - the language, food and attitude - change instantly, almost shockingly so.
I sat down in a cafe and tried to remember some Spanish, thus subjecting my already quite overwhelmed brain to another, quite unwelcome, language to deal with and spent the morning writing a long overdue paper accompanied by the chatter and music of the plaza. The vegetarian food options in the cafe made life remarkably simple - Tortilla Española or Pan con Tomate, and that's it. Both were amazing - but I was left feeling slightly grateful we didn't move to Spain (and slightly envious of all of the jamon).
Rosie arrived with Sam in the early afternoon and we went to find an outdoor shop to get supplies for a (probably ill-advised) hut trip that we're planning for with Sam next week. Our brief escapism imagining ourselves as elite mountain athletes was wrenched back to reality when I realized that Sam had undergone the kind of catastrophic nappy/diaper failure which is thoroughly incompatible with high end mountaineering shops. Rosie paid for our stuff while I changed Sam and looked around, trying not to make it obvious that I was scanning for stray bits of poo.
Slightly shaken, we walked around the old town, which was bustling and well kept (the town is a major ski destination from Barcelona, and as such seems upscale compared to the little villages on the French side). We went for dinner, imagining a quiet evening of tapas and Sangria on the plaza, and again briefly forgetting that we are responsible for a toddler.
Having dinner with a 16 month old is a bit like attempting to have a civilized meal with a goat. You can have the best intentions, provide the goat with all his favorite foods in idyllic surroundings, but you probably shouldn't expect the evening to go according to any predefined plan. Sam lasted about 3 minutes, after which he wriggled out of his seat and started offering his cheese to the neighboring diners. It becomes rapidly clear that we might not be able to eat at the same time for the foreseeable future.
We cycled home along the little road back to France, wondering why all borders couldn't be like this.
We spent yesterday mostly underestimating the scale of the mountains, still falling victim to the fact that meters are a remarkably big unit of altitude. After cycling to the wrong trailhead, going back down to the valley, and then the right trailhead, Sam was already pissed off. After I misread a sign which said the lake was 3 hours, rather than 3km away, Rosie was also pissed off. All this was significantly ameliorated by Sam learning the word for flower, which he reminded us of for the rest of the hike.
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| "Flowee" |
We reached a cafe - a nice benefit of hiking here is there are cakes as motivational targets, plus you can feel smug compared to the people who’ve just driven there. Sam duly terrorized the servers for following hour, so we left a big tip and sat on the side of the lake, surrounded by huge peaks, where Sam could joyfully expend his excess energy by throwing rocks in the water.
I set off on my bike this morning to spend a couple of hours in a cafe addressing my increasingly intimidating unread email inbox. The nearest town is Puigcerda - an old walled city perched on a hill on the Spanish border. Though the crossing is imperceptible apart from the change in language of the road signs, the cultural border - the language, food and attitude - change instantly, almost shockingly so.
 |
| The border |
I sat down in a cafe and tried to remember some Spanish, thus subjecting my already quite overwhelmed brain to another, quite unwelcome, language to deal with and spent the morning writing a long overdue paper accompanied by the chatter and music of the plaza. The vegetarian food options in the cafe made life remarkably simple - Tortilla Española or Pan con Tomate, and that's it. Both were amazing - but I was left feeling slightly grateful we didn't move to Spain (and slightly envious of all of the jamon).
Rosie arrived with Sam in the early afternoon and we went to find an outdoor shop to get supplies for a (probably ill-advised) hut trip that we're planning for with Sam next week. Our brief escapism imagining ourselves as elite mountain athletes was wrenched back to reality when I realized that Sam had undergone the kind of catastrophic nappy/diaper failure which is thoroughly incompatible with high end mountaineering shops. Rosie paid for our stuff while I changed Sam and looked around, trying not to make it obvious that I was scanning for stray bits of poo.
Slightly shaken, we walked around the old town, which was bustling and well kept (the town is a major ski destination from Barcelona, and as such seems upscale compared to the little villages on the French side). We went for dinner, imagining a quiet evening of tapas and Sangria on the plaza, and again briefly forgetting that we are responsible for a toddler.
Having dinner with a 16 month old is a bit like attempting to have a civilized meal with a goat. You can have the best intentions, provide the goat with all his favorite foods in idyllic surroundings, but you probably shouldn't expect the evening to go according to any predefined plan. Sam lasted about 3 minutes, after which he wriggled out of his seat and started offering his cheese to the neighboring diners. It becomes rapidly clear that we might not be able to eat at the same time for the foreseeable future.
We cycled home along the little road back to France, wondering why all borders couldn't be like this.
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