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.