La Guingeta to Es Bordes (Vielha)
….via France
Our third day in La Guingeta we cycled back into the little town of Esterri again, in search of bread, milk and lunch. We finally found a small Supermercat (Catalan again, not Spanish) which was open. This title turned out to be rather optimistic, said shop being less well stocked than our average English corner store, with one tiny fridge with a few yoghurts and cheeses and some vegetables which were beginning to take root in their boxes, if they hadn’t already dried out.
So for milk we had to default to UHT. That was hardly surprising, since we have been lodging in France we have found that the fresh milk is usually a few bottles snuck in next to the butter and cream (if we are lucky) or hiding in some obscure corner of a totally unrelated fridge (too often, I get plenty of exercise trying to find things in French supermarkets as their logique is, well, French! )
Back to the search, and for bread we found lots of packs of tostadas – very crunchy dry toasts which disintegrate to powder – but no processed bread (I know, but we freeze it and it lasts) and no sign of a bakers anywhere in town, which is most shocking especially given our proximity to France. What do the French campers do? (Some are so wedded to bread I suspect they turn right round and go back to the nearest boulangerie over the border. (More about that later).
Lunch was easier to locate as we reverted to the restaurant we found on our previous visit. Our choices were less successful than last time but washed down with a very acceptable glass of red, ultimately the meal was enjoyable (no cooking, no washing up, no mess – always a winner with us!). And again we could eat outside. I have surprised myself by not mentioning the weather so far! It has been beautiful, peaking at around 27 C during the afternoon, though naturally chilly at night due to the thinner air.
Horatio basks in the sun
This pretty flower is in all the campsites and seems to be a local symbol too
The gorgeous campsite restaurant – good food too
Our last evening, outside the campsite restaurant
On checking the weather for the next day, however, we decided to leave our lovely campsite as it was predicted to be cool and cloudy with 30% chance of rain – which would help counteract the overheating of Horatio’s engine when we ask him to lumber back over 14km of hairpin bends taking us back up to 2076m before using the engine as a brake on the way down the other side.
Good plan. Only thing was the rain kicked in almost immediately and we forgot that the elevation meant we would drive right up into the clouds. This made an already entertaining drive a bit more so. It also meant that the photos I had hoped to get were less lovely than the views we had coming south, though we did see several rainbows and drove through the bottom of at least 2, and a lot of cow poop. The road has snow depth poles all along it – these were taller than our motorhome which was somewhat disconcerting, as was viewing some of the ski lifts – from above….
The road up into the clouds
A view back down
The road decorators
The low point (in my head, not elevation) was being stuck at the traffic lights for the roadworks above Baquiera while they manoeuvred a large JCB on the single remaining carriageway, filtering us past in dribs and drabs. We waited about 15 minutes for our turn, with another JCB next to us on top of a wall of boulders just a couple of meters away, also working, and a sheer drop on our other side. Now that was scary.
Not what you want next to you at 1880m
Once through that, and Baquiera, we dropped down to Vielha and failed to find a supermarket accessible to 3.5 ton motorhomes. We carried on down, past the next potential campsites for that night until I managed to find some prepacked bread in an even tinier supermercat in Bossost. Success!
However, I had temporarily forgotten our other issue – gas. Having promised ourselves to top up our LPG tanks, which we use for cooking and heating, on the way up we didn’t. This may not have mattered too much (plenty for cooking and, if necessary, the odd overnight warm up in an air where we don’t have power) but Horatio’s latest foible is some kind of valve failure in the boiler system. The only way to keep the boiler full and therefore no airlocks in the rest of the van water system has turned out to be to heat the water. That seems to keep the pressure such that the water is not sucked back into the freshwater tank. If it cools enough that happens and we have so many airlocks we cannot even flush the loo. Catastrophe! So now we are running out of gas.
I quickly downloaded an app to locate GPL stations all over Europe. Initially B wouldn’t believe that the nearest garage with this was at a Super U, 40 minutes away, and 30 of those back in France. After checking out every Spanish garage on the way, it became evident the app was correct. To get gas (not bread) we had to go back to France!
Off we lumbered off in the continuing rain and got gas, bonus beer and sustenance (of sorts) at the neighbouring Flunch. Cheap and OK if your desperate and at least its better than McDonalds….and was just as well since (repetitive failure here) the restaurant next to that night’s campsite back up the valley in Spain was closed (luckily only that night).
Welcome to Camping Verneda – a nice site with posh stone floored (if chilly) shower blocks and is very, very green as its cooler with less sunny spots. We are next to the River Garonne which rises in the Pyrenees before flowing via Toulouse to Bordeaux and thence the Atlantic, giving its name to 2 departments along the way. Here it is fast flowing and so quite noisy, which is good as it helps to drown out the sounds of the lorries thundering along major road through the mountains which is also right next to the site!
The Garonne, coming from the mountains
…and heading for Toulouse
Typical hillside village
We figure a day or so here and then time to wend our way northward again, back to where we can ask for bread and understand the answer…..