Burning Down the House

So Nick and I had a little mishap cooking dinner tonight. The first thing to know in the description of our incident is what our kitchen setup is like. A common stove set-up in England consists of a small oven below a small "grill" -- which seems to be a little chamber with heat coils across the top of it. This is what we've got in our kitchen. Now, our stove is a bit quirky, because the oven takes a hugely long time to pre-heat. It takes it about 30-45 minutes to get up to about 250F, and never really gets any hotter than that. The grill seems to get up to normal temperature, though.



Prior to this term, the way we cooked things in the grill (which is how we had to cook things if we didn't want them to take at least an hour, since we also don't have a microwave) involved a baking tray. Now, the grill has two little ridges on each side that could theoretically hold a baking tray up close to the heating coils at the top so that you could cook them. But we didn't have an appropriately sized baking tray. Our tray was too wide to fit if you held it one way, and too narrow to sit on the ridges if you held it the other. So you had to slide it in kitty-corner with two opposite corners supporting all the weight. Occasionally it would come crashing down. I can draw diagrams if necessary for this point.

But over the Easter vacation, we got a real grill tray. The features of the grill tray are as follows. There's a physical tray, similar to the baking tray but maybe slightly deeper. Then there is a wire frill frame that sits on top of it that you actually put food on. There is a handle attached to the tray (although the handle gets hot when you're actually using it and you still need potholders). There is a layer of tinfoil between the tray and the wire platform that sits on top of it that people typically keep reusing until it gets really gross (your food touches the wire platform, not the tinfoil). And best of all, the physical tray is the right size, so you can just plop it down on the ridges inside the grill rather than fight to balance it.

So, tonight, Nick and I made fajitas for dinner, and needed to heat up the tortilla wraps. Because the food was almost ready and the oven was off, we decided to put them in the bottom of the grill (not on the tray, just on a plate sitting on the bottom of the grill) to warm them up. We plunk them in and wait. A few minutes later, Nick checks on them. The top ones are warm; the bottom ones are cold. (I think this is a function of having the heating coils at the top of the grill.) So Nick takes the stack, flips it over, sticks it back in the bottom of the grill, waits a few more minutes, and opens it back up.

And the grill is full of fire! The grill tray is in the grill -- and it's clearly on fire. (I don't exactly have any photos of this.) The kitchen has a door to the outside, so Nick put on a potholder, grabbed the grill tray by the handle, yanked it out of the grill, went out the door and down the half-flight of steps to the yard, and flipped it over on the grass to smother the flames. It worked! Apparently we didn't even kill the grass (although by the time Nick went back outside to retrieve the tray it was dark, so I'm not convinced he could really see how lively the grass was).

It seems that what had happened was Nick hadn't realized the grill tray was sitting on the ridges in the grill when he warmed up the fajitas (I didn't realize it mattered). Now, there are two ridges on the side, both of which are up pretty close to the heating coils, and when we cook things on the grill, we all slot the tray between the two ridges (so that it's sitting on the bottom one). If you put the tray on top of the top ridge to cook, I think your food would probably be actually touching the coils unless it was really flat. But if you're just sticking the tray back in the oven after cooking on it, you probably just plop it in any old way. And we typically leave the grill tray in the grill even when we're not using it because there's no place else in the kitchen for it -- and plus, normally you use it when you use the grill.

So it appears that some fat or something from somebody's meal had dripped down onto the tinfoil, which was an inch closer to the electric coils than normal -- which made it catch fire. Exciting!

After dinner, Nick and I took the tray back in and replaced the tinfoil. Good as new! The fajitas were good, and the wraps ended up being warmed just right.

Siuirana Climbing

At the moment I'm cranky because no one is driving to Mile End tomorrow, so I probably won't be able to go, but this post is about...

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Today when we got up it was finally clear, and the rain had stopped, although there were intermittent clouds. Nick and I ate breakfast relatively quickly and headed back to Grau dels Masets. We were disappointed to see that a climb we had identified two days ago as looking good, but hadn't yet done, was absolutely dripping. It was a 6b that shared anchors with a 7 (easy 5.12 range) that we wanted to toprope -- but both were sopping, so that was a no go.

We warmed up on some other stuff at the eastern part of Grau dels Masets, and did a pretty tricky 6b (one of the ones that Nick didn't quite onsight despite being pretty close, and then I flashed by using his beta and prehung draws -- strop strop). Then we heaed over to the western part of the crag to do some of the longer, more exposed stuff. The hand-drawn topo in the guidebook was confusing at first when we thought we found the world's softest 6b (turned out to be 5+), but then we figured it out and did a whole bunch of 6s there, almost all lead, pretty much all in the 5.10 range.

We ate lunch at one point while we waited for a route to free up. Both us and another party wanted to both do two routes that shared the same set of anchors. We wanted to lead one and TR the other; the other party wanted to lead both. So we were stepping on each other's heads and crossing ropes and all that stuff. So at one point they were doing something while we ate lunch and watched it get progressively cloudier.

However, it hadn't totally started raining or anything, so once we got the chance we attempted to TR the 6c+ that came down from the anchors we had already clipped. We knew that the start was going to be hard based on the other party, but Nick and I simply never figured it out, and the other party was gone by this point. Eventually we both pulled past it and both cleanly TRd the rest of the climb, which was in the 6c/6c+ range. The bouldery start to me felt way harder, since neither Nick nor I could find any way of doing it that was even close. I would have lead the rest if I had figured out a way to do the start, since the rest was totally my style. I kind of suspected that something had broken at the start at some point, though.

There were a few drops of rain after that, but it eventually passed and became sunny again, and Nick and I did a few more easy 6s before heading back to the campground. That night, we ate dinner at the campsite restaurant again (we were pretty much out of food, and there were also a few more sporadic rain showers at this point) and headed to bed early again. This was our most productive sport climbing day of the trip, and was generally really pretty good -- it was too bad we didn't have more days like this! We didn't take any pictures this day, though.

2 Down, 2 to Go

I finished my second exam this afternoon. Yesterday I had Family Law, which went okay, although I don't think it was particularly a strong suit for me. Today I had Intellectual Property, which I thought I did well on -- but everyone thinks they did well on that. And although they claim not to grade on a curve, that's silly -- just because there's not an entirely strict, inflexible curve doesn't mean that there isn't a curve; there's no other way to grade a qualitative subject. So we'll just have to see.

Next week I have International Intellectual Property on Tuesday and Civil Liberties on Friday. Stay tuned...

Speaking of Locusts...

Last night there was a giant bug that was flying up against my window trying to get in. I tried to get a photo of him, and of my thumb (for size comparison purposes), but they didn't come out great. He's at least an inch long, with like two inches of wingspan when they're out!





It's weird because England is mostly bug-free (and wildlife-free generally). But occasionally you apparently get mutant bugs and midge swarms.

Oh, and my Christmas cactus seems confused about what season it is -- it has a definite bud.

And when is the locust testing?

Darwin seems to have chosen exam period as the perfect time to do all sorts of intrusive maintenance in Malting House. Today was fire alarm testing, and a week from Monday is "asbestos testing" where they apparently need access to all our rooms.

My first exam is on Monday (three days). Stay tuned!

Vintage Baseball

A few weeks ago, Williams and Amherst reinacted the first ever intercollegiate baseball game (which they also played). It was held at Williams in traditional clothes, according to traditional rules. The only difference was that this time, Williams won! Article here; photos here.

Rome Revisited

Over the weekend, Nick and I saw the new Angels & Demons movie, which was fun because it was shot all over Rome and Nick and I kept seeing all the places we had been to when we visited back in December. Besides just St. Peter's Square and St. Peter's Basilica, we saw the Sistine Chapel (presumably they used a set piece for that), the Pantheon, Castel Sant'Angelo, Piazza del Popolo, Piazza Navona and the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and a lot of aerial shots of Rome and Vatican City. Fun!

Not-So-Sunny Siurana

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Overnight, we start to hear really strong winds around 2am. Really strong. I'm convinced the tent is going to blow away with us in it, and keep telling Nick. Nick keeps telling me to go back to sleep. Eventually I do -- but then the rains start. And it is pouring for what seems like hours. Nick still keeps telling me to go back to sleep. Eventually the rain dies down too.

But in the morning when we get up, everything is still quite damp (including Nick's pillow, which is really mine, because we were using both of mine for this trip). However, the sun is starting to make an appearance, and we decide that we'll wait a few hours for things to dry out.

Meanwhile, the "azure sky" group above us is packing up, and is trying to offload some of the random stuff they've acquired, so we take it. We get a lot of milk (which I'm really excited about until I see that it's UHT), a large thing of dishwashing soap, a huge bag of potatoes, onions (which I tell Nick not to put near any other food so the other food doesn't smell oniony), three or four unstarted rolls of toilet paper, and a few other random things.

At this point, our toilet paper roll count is quite high -- around 15 or 16. Here's how that happened: we had initially bought a 4-pack, because the bathrooms in the Fontainebleau campsite don't have their own toilet paper, and then decided to supplement with a 6-pack from Carrefour that we got on Saturday so that we would have enough to carry us through for a while. Except that Carrefour didn't have 6-packs -- so instead we got a 12-pack. But then there was toilet paper at the hotel in Andorra, and toilet paper in the Siurana campsite bathrooms (which had to be thrown in trash cans rather than flushed because the septic system couldn't handle it). So our toilet paper stock just kept increasing with the additional supplies from the Brits.

So after breakfast (muffins and bread from the campground's café/restaurant -- we didn't have much food left and it was way more convenient to get things from there then to drive for an hour on windy roads to get to a food store), things were still looking damp and we decided that we would walk into the tiny village of Siurana proper, which we hadn't been to yet (the campground is about half a mile from the village itself). There, we could see if there were any viable food stores (there weren't, really, other than restaurants) and just take a look at the little mountain village. And hopefully the rock would dry in the meantime.

We could just see the refugio on a clifftop on the walk into town, and we could also see some of the crags we had driven by on the way in, as well as the wiggly road we came in on (no wonder I felt carsick!).







The town center was old, and was also entirely pedestrianized -- had we stayed at the nice hotel there, we would have had to carry all our luggage in by about half a mile (we saw some people walking out with luggage).







We walked over to the mountaintop that had a church and a monument on it.











Finally, we walked over to the cliffs that were near this part of town. The good news was that they were pretty much dry (they'd had direct sun on them for a few hours at this point), but the bad news was that there was another impending rain cloud in the distance.



Nevertheless, we decided to head back to the campground, hope the rain would hold off, and attempt to go climbing. So we headed back, taking another picture of the wiggle-road along the way.







So then we decided to attempt to head back to the area we were at yesterday, despite intermittent sprinkles and a few thunder growls. We were hungry for lunch, and decided we would take it with us. So this time we used the car to drive to the parking for the crag, and decided to eat lunch before doing the 15-minute hike to the crag from the parking while the weather decided whether or not to really rain.

Well, right when we were finishing lunch, it did start to really rain. And rain and rain and rain.

We headed back to the campground's restaurant, and spent the whole afternoon there waiting for a break in the rain. It came in and out, but it never stopped long enough for there to be any sort of dry rock available. Nick and I played about a gazillion games of tens and gin rummy, and I composed some blog posts on the netbook. We also discovered that there was a room with two ancient PCs that in theory did usually have internet access that you could use for like a euro/30 mins or something (in theory; in practice they didn't enforce paying), but even those didn't have internet at the moment because the campground had shut off access during the thunderstorms to keep everything from getting fried. There was a movie screen that people were watching climbing movies on, and the Brits at the table next to us were watching a UK film, and one of them seemed to have a personal grudge against one of the climbers in the movie, so it was fun to listen to his rants for a while.

Eventually Nick couldn't take any more card games, but it was clear there wasn't going to be any more dry rock today. I took a shower and then we ate dinner in that same restaurant (which was actually really good). So those were our adventures. We were pretty cranky after the whole long, long afternoon -- but at least it seemed like it had finally rained itself out by nightfall.

I told you that mackeral sky wouldn't be good.

Sunny Siurana

Back in time to...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

When we woke up in the morning in our campsite in Siurana, the first thing we here is one of the psyched Brits in the campsite next to ours saying "Azure sky! Not a cloud in sight! AZURE sky!". So Nick and I poke our heads out of the tent and see that, as usual, the Brits don't understand exactly what clouds are (I have seen a lot of forecasts in England that are "partly cloudy" with "100% cloud cover" -- what's "partly" about that?). The sky in Siurana isn't so much azure sky as it is mackerel sky. So I tell Nick that rain is coming in a day or two.

But today really is still quite sunny, despite the high clouds. So we start by going into the campsite's café/restaurant/reception and taking a look at the campground's guidebook with all the new routes in it, and copy a few of them down that are applicable to the areas we are going to today. So then we pack up and head to our first choice of crag near where we climbed yesterday. But when we get there, it's pretty intimidating -- it's on the side of a gorge and feels pretty exposed, and a lot of the 6s have pretty high first bolts with not-so-easy starts below them. Nick is feeling particularly unpsyched about this. So we took some photos but then decide that maybe we should see whether the other crag we had picked out as a good starting crag would be a better choice.

So we head over to Grau dels Masets, camì and oest. It takes us a little while to find the walk-in, which is down a dirt road for a bit before a not-entirely-obvious turnoff (we kept trying to turn off too soon), but eventually find the trail and make it down. Once we get there, we know that this crag is more our speed. There are toddlers, doggies, and Brits -- total gumby crag. Perfect. The bolts are closer together, the first bolts are lower, there is lots more shade, and the terrain isn't so steep that you think that if someone blows it before they get to the first bolt you'll both go tumbling to the bottom of the gorge. But there are still pretty views across the gorge.





We did an easy 6 at the eastern half of the crag to warm up and then, due to the gumby factor, moved over to Grau dels Masets (oest) so we could have a bit more space. We did a few good 6s over there, including one that I really liked called Rocky. Everything was in the 5.10 range, but pretty well spread out between .10a and .10d. I flashed everything (pinkpoint!); Nick almost onsighted everything but hung once or twice while grumbling about hanging draws and not having beta. Everything was long, but nothing was too much of a challenge for our 60m rope.



Then, we headed back to the eastern half and did one more 5+ there, but at this point it was actually already quite late in the day (crag-finding and new-route-copying took a lot of time), so then headed back out.





We get back to the campsite and cook dinner (well, Nick cooks while I shower). The weather is still sunny, but I hadn't liked the looks of some of the high clouds during the day. Nick, though, proved by induction that the weather would stay good tomorrow (it was good yesterday, and it was good today).

While we're cooking dinner, it starts to get significantly colder now that the sun is sinking, but it's still not bad.



We look at the guidebook some more to make plans for tomorrow, generally get organized, and head into the tent to play some more cards and go to bed.

© in Clothes

Every so often, people get stroppy that fashion designers don't have intellectual property protection for their creations in the US. A recent article advocates creating a sui generis "fashion design right" that would protect clothing designers from infringement by "closely and substantially similar" designs. By creating a sui generis right, it gets around the problem of copyright law not protecting "useful articles." Boat hulls and semiconductor chips are also unprotected by copyright law but instead have separate protection similar to copyright.

But I think that this is a bad idea for clothes for a whole bunch of reasons. First of all, I'm not sure how we're going to say that clothes that are "substantially similar" don't infringe, but clothes that are "closely and substantially similar" do. What sort of rules or standards can we apply here? The difference between "inspired by" and "knockoff" isn't always going to be nearly as clear as the article suggests, possibly to the point where it's impossible to tell what infringes, and the sui generis right just turns into copyright. Which brings me to my second point: there's a reason for the exclusion of useful articles from copyright protection. There's only so much an article of clothing can do, and if we start overprotecting things where form is tied up too closely with function, everything suddenly starts to become monopolized. Third, there is no discussion of how long the fashion design right might last. Both semiconductor chips and boat hulls are protected for a maximum of ten years. Does designer clothing really need to be protected for any longer than, say, six months? After a few months, the dilution problem presented by knockoffs goes way down because the designer clothes are now out of fashion, anyway. And once you get to such short periods of time, things become less administerable. (Aside: There are proposals I've read to give reporters, like, 24 hours of IP protection over facts they report on to prevent other reporters and bloggers from piggybacking on them. Interesting, but problematic -- but that's another story.)

Fourth, the fashion industry in the US isn't exactly withering away. Jason Wu is now, like, really famous. Is there a real need to give exclusive rights to an industry that is doing fine without them? Fifth, originality is going to be a problem because even designer clothes are closely derived from what came before. Will the fashion design right have a softer originality standard than copyright? Sixth, trademark law already gives the fashion industry some protection (which is addressed in the penultimate paragraph of the article). While the protection offered by TM law is obviously incomplete, that doesn't mean that we automatically need to give a greater monopoly.

And, seventh, I <3 F21.

Andorra and Siurana

I typed this back while in Siurana...

It isn't raining in Siurana at the moment, but after thunder and hailstorms throughout the day, everything is drenched. We've played about a million card games this afternoon. But this post is about...

Monday, April 13, 2009

We woke up relatively early in the hotel, but it wasn't quite as early as we thought at the time, because I forgot that my phone was on English rather than Andorran time. Nevertheless, we were checked out of the hotel by about 10:45 Andorra time, having already eaten breakfast (leftover croissants and pain au chocolats from Fontainebleau). At one point during breakfast, Nick and I were talking about internet privacy, and how the second your Facebook status switches to "engaged," Facebook starts giving you a million wedding-based ads. Nick said, "Never send me an email with the word "engagement" in it -- Gmail already thinks I'm trying to get into Harvard for law school!" Which makes Nick very stroppy.

So then we drove into Andorra la Vella to take a look around Andorra's capital city before we continued on down south to Siurana. It was nice in some ways, but in some ways it kind of reminded us of one big duty-free shop. There were also a surprising number of Pilates studios.





















From there, we headed back to our car to do the approximately three-and-a-half hour drive to Siurana. Finding our car was a bit cruxy because there were about five identical-looking parking garages right next to each other, but we got it eventually. So off we went!

Most of the drive to Siurana was uneventful, although we came across some interesting-looking cloud formations.





We also went past a completely flooded plain that I failed to take a picture of. It stretched on for quite a while (the highway was well above it). That was interesting.

Just when I started to get worried that we weren't going to a real climbing area because we were still in a completely flat, rockless area with only like 30 miles left to drive, we suddenly started to go around sharp curves and began to see some real cliffs. I had to tell Nick to slow himself down when he claimed that he was "taking the racing line."



Finally, we got to an extremely curvy section of road. I felt so carsick. And I wasn't sure whether the car was going to make it, either. I also got worried that the campground wasn't even going to exist because the terrain was so suddenly steep. We eventually finally pulled into the campsite and checked in, and then drove around to find a little spot for our tent. There were a lot of little tiers (not too dramatic) and we got a spot on one of them, and set up. I was in charge of the tent poles.

I also was in charge of picking up the guidebook, which was interesting. The campground sold it, but the lady explained to me that the guidebook was about 8 years old and a lot of new routes had been put up since then, so the campground owned a copy with the new routes penciled in that we could borrow and copy when we had time. So that was relatively useful. We didn't copy any routes today but decided we would tomorrow.

After eating a late (like 4pm lunch), we went off to do a token climb for the day at Ca L'Isabel, which was a very short walk from the campsite. The climb itself wasn't too bad (a 6a with a low crux), but the setting was very exposed since it was basically on a cliff that was high above the valley floor. After that, we gathered our stuff up, looked around at the other nearby crags briefly, and headed back to the campsite to cook dinner.

The good news was that the camping stoves were working significantly better than they had been in Fontainebleau -- Nick claimed that all the curves on the drive had shaken them up so that they now worked well.



I also managed to take a shower, which was reasonably warm, and not a push-button.

After dinner, we went to bed fairly early, especially since, although it was warm in the sun during the day, the air itself was cold and getting rapidly colder after sunset. Nick was a little worried about what we would climb for the rest of our time in Siurana, since a lot of the areas had more 7s and 8s than 6s, but we picked a few likely crags to visit tomorrow, and went to sleep.

Rap-Pitoning?!

I just learned something new. Apparently, it is not unheard of for new, hard sea-cliff routes in the UK (typically way up on remote Scottish islands) to have pitons hammered into them on rappel by the first ascensionist before they do the FA. For heaven's sake. If you're rappelling to put the pitons in, can't you just use bolts?

I recently rewatched Hard Grit, and a lot of things struck me as kind of ridiculous. I mean, it was really just people with crashpads and pillows and mattresses and thermarests, doing toprope rehearsals, making GIANT tickmarks, preplacing tons of gear and taping it into place, climbing with four ropes and five belayers who were prepared to jump off rocks in six different directions. And then it turned out that maybe those routes weren't as hard as everyone thought, anyways. That's "trad"?

If I was going to make a parody of Committed, I'd call it "Contrived."

Spring Break and Snow Chains

It is still sprinkling in Siurana as I type this. But this post is about...

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Today was the big driving day of this part of our trip. We were driving 522 miles from Fontainebleau, France to Sant Julià de Lòria, Andorra. The drive was forecast to take about 8 and a half hours, and ended up being over ten, door-to-door (including lunch and gas stops).

When we woke up in Fontainebleau, it was sprinkling, but it stopped while we packed up the tent, ate breakfast, and checked out of the campground. Luckily, the fussy baby from the night before had packed up and gone to a gîte yesterday, so we slept better. As we were packing up, we ran into Goldie-from-Cambridge, who had apparently been there since Thursday, and was staying at our campsite. He was there with a few other Cambridge people, apparently, but Nick and I later tried to find their tent and failed. So we continued packing up, and checked out. We were on the road at 10:18, French-time.

So we drove and drove and drove, mostly along the expensive péages that take us to southern France. We were still radio-less, so I napped for a while, and then, while stuck in traffic, brought out the netbook and started drafting blog posts. It rained for quite a bit of the afternoon, so when we stopped to make lunch around 2:30 in the afternoon, we had to do it under the roof outside of the bathroom at a rest stop. That took about half an hour (we cooked hamburgers on the camping stove!), and then we were back in the car.

We still didn't have the radio working, so I spent a few hours reading car license plates out loud in French to practice my French numbers. When that finally got boring, I just put on my iPod (with my headphones in) and sung songs out loud to Nick when I could remember the words. That killed another few hours. Finally, we got to the base of the Pyrenees.

This is when we started to get nervous. Nick and I had decided that we probably didn't need chains on the car at this time of year, but we could see snow on top of some of the higher mountains, and we could also see several cars coming down with snow on their roofs. Uh oh. It had clearly been snowing in the Pyrenees while it had been raining in the rest of France. So even though the road was currently clear, we were worried about what it might turn into. But we started up anyway.

As we gained in altitude, we started seeing more and more snow on the side of the road, but the road itself was clear, and there was no black ice (and it was slightly above freezing). So we kept heading up, even as the precipitation started to get murkier and we ended up in fog and/or a cloud.



There were some real hairpin turns, and eventually we got to the Andorra border, where a cold-looking immigration officer just waved us through. Then we got to the tunnel that takes us through to the main part of Andorra. The tunnel was several miles long, but the good news was that when we emerged on the other side, the weather was significantly better because we were now officially on the south side of the Pyrenees. The temperature was back above freezing (it had dipped below), and there was less fog, cloud, and snow. We had made it!



We still had to find our hotel (Hotel Husa Imperial), though, which was way closer to the Spanish border of Andorra than the French one. Problematically, the GPS started to go really haywire, apparently because of reflections from the high mountains around us. It was convinced we were on different roads than we were, that we weren't on any roads at all, and that we were driving at over 250mph (it dinged at us when we did that). So the GPS was not helping us find the hotel. Meanwhile, the map that we had downloaded from the internet of where the hotel was turned out to be really wrong. Instead of being up a steep road out of town, it was right in the center of Sant Julià de Lòria, and we had driven right past it. Oops.

So finally, around 8:30pm, we found our hotel, checked in, and parked the car (for an extra 12 euros for the night). The hotel was pretty dead (it was Easter, after all), but we had a nice big room.



We eventually got ourselves psyched up to go walk around and look for dinner.



We found one other open place besides the hotel restaurant, so we went there. It was a small bar that served tapas and pizza -- we went for pizza, since we really couldn't understand what any of the tapas, besides the patates, were. So that was good.

From there we headed back to the hotel, took quite decent showers, and went to bed.

Weekend Punting

So I went punting twice this weekend, which was a "bank holiday" weekend in England. On Saturday, it was sunny, and the river was extremely crowded, so I only punted up at the far end of the river to avoid too many collisions. On Monday, it was colder and cloudier, and so I did a bit more punting, and am definitely getting better at it. We also took a lot more toys punting on Monday, like cameras and a GPS. I was able to go at a steady 1mph, but Nick could go up to 2mph, and even got the GPS to jump up to 3 at one point.

When we left for punting on Monday, the punt shed seemed to be out of oars, which are really only necessary if you can't steer (both Nick and I can), if you need to push off of obstacles (only really a problem if you can't steer, plus I had brought an umbrella in case of rain that could double as a pokey-stick), and if you drop a punt pole, which seemed unlikely. But I convinced Nick to throw a broken plastic kayak paddle that was in the punt shed into the boat, just in case.

It turned out to be a good decision, because at one point I overestimated the depth of the river while simultaneously underestimating how close we were to a bridge while simulaneously overestimating the height of the bridge when I lowered the punt pole. As we moved forward, the pole got stuck between the ground and the bridge, so I was smart and let go, and we continued sailing on without the punt pole. So Nick half-paddled us back to it with the broken kayak paddle, and meanwhile another boat had gotten it down and torpedoed it back in our direction (they float). So we got it back without too much trouble. But now I've learned to just float slowly under bridges. You can see the punt pole stuck under the bridge in the background here:



Plenty more photos are up on Facebook here.

Arctic Offwidthing

Not to get completely out of order, because there are still like ten days of the France and Spain trip I haven't blogged yet, but yesterday (real time) Nick and I went to Stanage in the Peak District. The day was supposed to be a sunny May day, so even though I took a fleece coat and a rainjacket, I wore capri pants. Mistake!

The second we got out of the car, despite the fact that it was sunny, and it was May, I felt like I was in a hurricane. It was so windy. And it wasn't a warm wind, either. Nick said it would be less windy near the crag, and that was probably true -- but it was just that the hurricane had dropped a category. So I spent most of the day trying to find little holes to dig myself into to stop myself from developing hypothermia. (Nika: "How do I know if hypothermia, Nick?" Nick: "You stop fussing and become very quiet. I'm not too worried yet.") Also, it clouded over for long periods, and even sprinkled raindrops not once, not twice, but three times during the day. Never enough to give me an excuse to go back to the car, though.

Meanwhile, Nick was having great fun doing lots of classic cracks that I was really struggling with, because they were extremely wide. He was able to do a lot of jamming in them, but my feet really were too narrow to jam at all, and I had to do laybacks rather than any sort of hand jams (and I do know how to hand jam, just not fist jam). So I was skidding all over the place trying to follow these slimy, slopey laybacks that he had jammed up on lead. Which wasn't making me any happier.

The "classic" one of these we did was Goliath's Groove, where I had all my problems at once. The crack at the bottom was too big for me to fit in, so I was half-laybacking, half-stemming. Meanwhile, Nick was at the top of the climb in the hurricane and couldn't hear me saying "up rope, keep it tight." This felt like the longest climb in the Peak District, so there was actual rope stretch, too. So when my fingers slipped off of the layback slopers and I fell off I whacked my elbow hard into the rock and burst into tears before I shivered my way up the rest of the stupid climb. So I didn't particularly like that one.

The other classics we did that were actually good were The Right Unconquerable, which I had actually seconded back in the fall (Nick had never led it before, and was nervous about it, but did a great job -- although he took the less-direct finish that was less well protected but didn't have a scary mantle because it was sprinkling when he got there) and Tower Face, which I actually really liked and didn't involve any real crack climbing. I felt like if I wasn't shivering so much Tower Face would be a good one for me to lead, too -- but I was too cold.

The Right Unconquerable would have been tricky for me to lead -- there was a lot more power involved because you had to layback a gigantic flake for a lot of it. But I was proud of myself on the Right Unconquerable because we had run into a CUMC team that was on it before us, and the second couldn't get two nuts out, so I was put on nut-retrieval duty, and I did it! Including the nut that had somehow turned upside down by the time I got to it. I was also perky on that climb because by the time I was doing it the sun had finally come out, for good, and the wind had finally died down.



Eventually we finished up around 7pm -- right when the wind finally started to die down. We had a pub dinner nearby (I had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding!) and then drove back. I warned Nick that I was going to crank the heat, and did, and then when I fell asleep in the car he tried to turn it down but I woke up immediately when I heard him turn the dial and made him turn it back up.

Today is a "bank holiday" in England, so Nick doesn't have to work. He's on mountainbiking adventures at the moment, but we're going punting again this afternoon. But it's still really chilly today -- like 45 Fahrenheit and overcast. But I am going to take a lot of warm clothes punting.

Final Fontainebleau Day

I am writing this sitting in the campground's cafeteria in Siurana while it continues to pour outside. But this post is about ...

Saturday, April 11, 2009

I didn't get a ton of sleep this night because there was a very fussy baby in a nearby tent, so that was sort of my alarm clock in the morning. The good news was that it hadn't rained again at all overnight, so the showers yesterday afternoon wouldn't impact the rock today.

Nick and I started with another trip to Carrefour to pick up some more food that we would need for the next few days, since tomorrow was Easter and the day after that was "Easter Monday," when a lot of shops would apparently still be closed.

However, this didn't take us too long, and it wasn't long before we were headed up to Rocher Fin. We tried a few red circuit problems here, some of which felt easier than others. We did a good number of 5s, but no 6s. There were also a lot of topouts that I beach-whaled.







































We worked on a 6A traverse on a boulder called "The Cube," and even though I did well on it, I didn't get it.







Eventually, though, the weather got significantly cloudier and I got boreder, so Nick and I headed back to the campground, where we picked up the netbook, drove into town, turned off the car lights and everything else, and booked ourselves a hotel in Andorra for tomorrow night (about 40 pounds for a nice hotel, pretty good). It started raining some, but then it was back to the campground for dinner, and by the time we were actually at the campground, it had stopped again.

I headed off to take a shower in the upper shower block, which had hot water again. It took forever because I had to push the shower button every 8 seconds, but I figured that dinner would be done by the time I came out of the shower. Unfortunately, I found a frustrated Nick back at the campsite.

It turned out that neither of his two camping stoves were starting, and his fingers were very dirty from dismantling them. After continuing with that for a while, he eventually let me go up and order a pizza from the guy who comes to the at campground every Saturday to sell pizza out of his pizza van (kind of neat). So I bought a pizza and meanwhile Nick got one stove cooking and made a few (small) hamburgers to supplement (although the stove then fizzed out again later). By the time we were done eating, though, it was totally dark after that boondoggle.

So that was our last day in Fontainebleau on that leg of the trip. It started to sprinkle again as we were finishing cleaning up and stuff before going into the tent, so it was probably good that we were finished there for now.