Boondoggling in France

Monday, April 20, 2009

Although it had been chilly outside overnight, when Nick, Neal, and I got up in the morning on Monday, it was already starting to warm up.  We had leftover croissants for breakfast and then geared up for a trip to the grocery store, which, despite being a hypermarket, was part of an even larger mall.  The mall also had a store called Decathlon that sold cheap outdoor stuff, which we we planned to go to to get Neal a temporary replacement tent/sleeping bag to use while he waited to get back the ones the airline had lost.

We got to the mall at about 8:45, but apparently all the big shops, including Carrefour and Decathlon, didn’t open until 9, so we milled around for a little bit.  Neal wanted to go get coffee, but thought he had accidentally left his wallet in the car, so Nick loaned him some money.  Meanwhile we watched people with shopping carts line up outside the Carrefour, getting ready to charge right at 9.

So, at 9, we joined the crowds and got our final food supplies for our last two days.  We then brought them out to the car before going to Decathlon so that Neal could do a full wallet search.  He figured it had fallen out of one of his pockets.  No luck, though.

After searching for a while we figured we would check back at the campsite and hope it was there, and meanwhile Mr. Moneybags Nick would be in charge of loaning money so that we could get things moving.  So we went to Decathlon, picked up some cheap gear, and headed back to the campground.  By this point things were actually getting pretty sunny and hot.

A thorough campground search, and a check with the campground office, revealed no wallet.  We also did a more thorough inspection around the seats of the car – nothing.  We knew that Neal had had the wallet as late last night as when we bought the pizza.  Neal was still psyched to climb though, so he figured that he would climb for a few hours and then go into Paris in the evening and deal with cancelling cards and stuff there.

So, we ate lunch and headed out to Bas Cuvier.  It was almost too hot, but it was still fun.  We tried mostly Red Circuit problems.  At one point, Neal tried to talk French to someone, but after a minute or two, the other guy said “let’s try English” – the other guy turned out to be from Colorado.  So that was funny.  Poor Neal.

One 6A that I had never been on before, that I was close on, was called Le Trou du Simon.  It had a terrifying topout that I worked out all the beta for but couldn’t bring myself to do.  Nick did it, using my beta.  After a while, we wandered over to La Marie Rose, which I wasn’t expecting to be difficult even though it was a 6A – I had done it multiple times in the past without too much trouble.  Nick re-flashed it (the way Daddy does), but I fell off on the first try, and next thing I knew there were about 5 or 6 other people who all came over to work it/slime it up.  And then I continued to fall off 5 or 6 more times, never successfully doing the hot and slimy topout (although I consistently did the normal crux move over and over).  So that was pretty frustrating.

At one point, Nick got on photo duty at least.

  

   

Neal tried it a few times, but he didn’t send either – he had already spent a little while flying off of L’Hélicoptère so was a little tired.

By this point, we were all getting kind of tired and ready to head into Paris.  Nick and I had vague plans to meet up with little sister Sage, who was studying there, and Neal had to get his wallet issues taken care of.  But first, we had to rescue Nick.  See, the issue is that the real crux of La Marie Rose is actually the descent.  When you get to the top of the boulder, you can either downclimb a 5A slab problem around the corner from La Marie Rose, which I suspect may actually be the easiest route but I’ve never actually tried because no one else thinks that’s the easiest way, or else you can take one of two normal descents involving another boulder.  The first of the two descents involves chimneying down an increasingly slick passageway between the La Marie Rose boulder and the one next to it.  I’ve done that once in the past, but it was desperate.  The second of these two normal descents involves making a flying leap from the La Marie Rose boulder to the one next to it that you would otherwise chimney against.  (Well, it’s not really a flying leap – it’s even scarier.  Rather than going foot first, you basically stick your hands out in front of you and lean forward so that you fall into a diagonal plank/pushup position against the other boulder – then you step your feet across to meet your hands.)  Even after your flying leap, you’re not home free – you still have a tricky downclimb from that boulder that I insist on a crashpad for.

The issue was that Nick had climbed up the 5A slab with his camera to take La Marie Rose photos.  When he got to the top of the boulder, he took off his shoes.  Eventually, he decided he wanted to take photos from the other boulder, and so did the flying leap with his camera (which looked precarious).  He had left his shoes behind.  And now he was stuck on top of the other boulder without his shoes (which would be necessary to do the downclimb) and unable to reverse the flying leap back to the La Marie Rose boulder.

I was tempted to leave him up there, but instead I had to go up the 5A slab to rescue the shoes, which I wasn’t too pleased about, because it meant that I would have to now do one of the descents.

So, eventually after much coaxing I did the fall-into-the-pushup position “flying leap” across the chimney and made it across to the other boulder and eventually did the downclimb from there, too, after Nick did it first (now with his shoes) and brought me a crashpad.

So, from there, we headed back to the campsite to drop off our climbing gear, pack up Neal’s stuff, and head to the Melun train station to take the train into Paris.  We also had to take all the stuff from our car, which was staying in the parking garage at the train station, and put it into the tent, because Nick was worried about theft.  Then we headed out.

It took a little while to get going at the parking garage because Neal was trying to negotiate with the credit card companies over the phone, but eventually we made it onto the train and headed into Paris.  Neal headed off to spend the night there and deal with all his problems, and we arranged for Nick to meet up with him in London after he got replacement cards and before he went back to America for him to pay Nick back (Neal was actually in London for a week or two visiting his sister, and this Fontainebleau trip was just a side trip).

After we got into Paris and said goodbye to Neal, the next step was finding Sage, who was about half an hour late, in the giant Gare de Lyon.  This involved multiple phone calls between my English cell phone and her French one that were costing us both a million dollars.  Eventually we were both insisting we were at track K, but neither of us could see each other.  Nick was about to have a heart attack based on the price of our phone usage, and said to me, “tell her to wave her hand in the air,” which I did – it turned out that she was actually on the platform, somehow, rather than at the obvious end of it, which Nick figured out.  So we found her.

For a little while, we walked around Paris and kept our eye out for good restaurants.  Sage told me about some French-Asian fusion restaurant that I wanted to go to, but it wasn’t on her map so we ended up at a different place.  Before we got there, though, we took some various photos.

At dinner, I was dying of thirst, so Sage was in charge of ordering lots and lots of water for our table.  That was good.  The restaurant had another potato pizza on the menu, which I was still in the mood for, but apparently they were out of some ingredient so I ended up getting chicken instead.  Tant pis.

At dinner, Nick realized that one issue we would have is that we would be getting back to the campground after 10pm, which was going to be a problem because the gates closed at 10.  We would be able to park the car just outside with no issues, but the tent was full with tons of stuff that would need to go in the car while we slept (we couldn’t just put it outside the tent; things got really dewy at night).  We would need to drag all this stuff across the field and out to the car, and possibly would need to lift it over the gate if there wasn’t a human-sized gate next to the car gate that was open.  The crux was going to be my large, 50+ lb suitcase (don’t forget that we were on a two-week trip involving a large variety of activities and climates) – lifting that over the car gate would be tough.

Oh well.  No matter what, we would be getting back to the campground after 10, so we spent a little bit more time looking around and taking pictures.  Nick was particularly interested in seeing the outside of the Louvre at night, so we headed over there for a little bit.

 

After that, we all got on the Metro and said goodbye to Sage.  Nick and I had an uneventful train ride back to Melun.

When we got to Melun just after midnight, though, the events started back up again.  The parking garage where we had left the car was totally locked up (with the car inside it), even though there were no signs anywhere indicating operating hours.  The campground, with all our stuff, was over ten miles away.  We looked around, and saw that the car entrance door would open – if you had a valid ticket from the garage already to stick in it.  (That would indicate that you had your car parked in there and were getting it out.)  But earlier in the night I had told Nick, “I’m going to leave the ticket in the car while we go into Paris” and Nick had said “that’s fine.”  So the ticket was locked up in the garage.  We waited to see if any of the few people still coming out of the train station were headed towards the garage so that we could tailgate in, but none of them seemed to.

So, we took a better look at the garage.  The “windows” (open parts of the concrete) on the first floor (“ground floor” if you’re European) were blocked by chain link fencing, so you couldn’t get in through them.  However, the windows on the upper floors weren’t, so if we could find a way to the upper windows we could hop in through those, walk down to the bottom floor where the car was parked, and drive out (clearly, that would work after-hours since the entrance door was set up to open after hours with a ticket).

While most of the upper floor windows were not at all accessible, it looked possible to climb up to a slight roof that was right above the car entrance and exit doors, which gave easy access to upper floor windows.  Nick was on duty, and did a good job hopping up there – he said it wasn’t too hard, but was a little scary with just the road underneath him because the hardest part was about 10-15 feet up.  As soon as he was established on the roof, it was easy – now he was at an upper level with no chain link blocking the windows, and just hopped right in, walked down them ramp, and opened up the car and got the ticket out.

At that point, even though it wasn’t necessary, he passed the ticket through the chain link out to me, and I was able to stick it into the slot that opened the car entrance door, so I went in and met him inside.  There were definitely no signs anywhere either (1) telling you to take your ticket with you or (2) indicating that the garage would close at any point, so that made us mad.

Anyway, at that point we were able to use our ticket from the inside to pay and open the exit gate to drive back to the outside, and back the the campground.  That whole adventure probably took an extra 45 minutes.

At the campground, even though the car gate was closed like we thought, there was at least an open human gate next to it, which was good news for getting all our gear back to the car – it meant that we could roll my giant suitcase through it rather than needing to lift it over the car gate.  So that was good.  I finally took a shower after that and we went to sleep for our last night in France; we had only one more half-day left there!

Fontainebleau, Again

Sunday, April 19, 2009

When we got up in the morning at the new campground in Fontainebleau, it had stopped raining (although things were still rather damp).  We managed to find a bakery that was still open to pick up breakfast at, and then Nick wandered around our campground and eventually found some of the OUMC people we had intended to meet up with – although not all of them.  Apparently some of the group were stuck in England (including one girl who was actually French) because French workers were striking and blockading the ports so ferries from England couldn’t get in.

So we hung out with them for a little while, but not very long – they actually had to leave that morning and were packing up their (quite buggy) campsite before Nick went over and distracted them.  We ate breakfast there, and Nick also cooked a giant pot of hot chocolate.  We had a surplus of yucky UHT milk and the only thing to do with it was to make hot chocolate out of it.  The milk had come from a party we had camped next to in Siurana that had a surplus of a bunch of supplies that they didn’t want anymore and gave to us (we also had a giant bag of potatoes, a lot of dishwashing soap, and 3-4 more rolls of toilet paper we picked up from them).

Eventually, Nick couldn’t distract the rest of them with hot chocolate any more, and they took off.  Things still weren’t very dry, so Nick went on a sudden let’s-clean-the-car rampage – the back was getting very messy.  So I mostly observed while he rounded up the escaped potatoes and got them all back into their bag.  He also took inventory of our toilet paper – that had sort of gotten out of control, too.  See, back when we were in Fontainebleau the first time around, the campground we were at didn’t provide you with toilet paper in the bathrooms, and we assumed this would be the case for the rest of the trip.  So, on the Saturday, knowing that Easter Sunday and Monday were coming up, we wanted to pick up a 6-pack of toilet paper.  But the store didn’t have 6-packs.  So we ended up with a 12-pack of toilet paper.  But then we stayed in a hotel Sunday night – and when we got to the Siurana campsite on the Monday night it turned out that one did have toilet paper.  Then we got another 4 rolls of toilet paper from the group camping next to us.  Our next stop was the hotel on the next Friday night, and then the Fontainebleau campsite we were at now – which also had toilet paper.  So now we had a collection of about 16 rolls of toilet paper rolling around in the back of the car, which Nick was sorting out.  He also dedicated a “bags’ bag” for the empty bags floating around.  I mostly observed this and ate more of the gummy worms I had got in Andorra.

Finally, we decided that things had dried up enough to make an attempt to go climbing, and headed over to Apremont, where Nick wanted to try his project.  Some of the holds turned out to be wet, but we still had fun on some of the problems around it, and took some photos.

 

 

After that, it was our lunch time.  Meanwhile, we had made plans to meet up with Neal-from-HMC sometime in the afternoon, which was complicated since none of us had cellphones that were particularly reliable in France.  We were using his sister, based in England, as a liason.  However, we somehow did manage to meet up with him at the Melun train station after lunch.  Neal was a little stressed out, because one of his bags was lost on his flight from New York to London, and was now tent-less, but he was still up for heading to the boulders.

Meanwhile, things had started to dry, and by the time we had Neal, the sun had come way out.  The three of us then headed over to Cul de Chien for some late afternoon bouldering.  I did a couple 5Cs, but nothing harder than that; Nick and Neal both did similarly.

Eventually, we tired Nick out, and Neal was trying to save his fingers for future projects, so we headed into town, intending to pick up a pizza to take back to the campsite for dinner.

Well, that turned into an epic – the pizza shop, which Nick had ordered from in the past, was very slow.  After interpreting the menu (kind of), we picked a pizza with potatoes for a topping – I love those!  But one of the other toppings on the pizza we didn’t want, so we ordered it without those.  Then we waited … for a long time.  Eventually, after checking in several times, it turned out that the pizza lady had accidentally made a pizza with the topping we didn’t want.  We’d already been waiting like 45 minutes by this point, and would have happily taken it anyway – but she said she’d already thrown it out and was making a new one.  Ugh.  I think she was sensing a mutiny and gave us a free bottle of Coke – but I don’t even like Coke.  It pleased Nick and Neal, though.

Eventually we got back to the campground and ate our pizza – finally.  After that, we headed to bed, which was a bit tricky.  Nick’s tent only fits two people (barely), so Neal was stuck sleeping in the back of Nick’s car, which is a station wagon (or, in British, an “estate”).  Luckily, after Nick’s cleaning rampage, the back was a little cleaner, so we were able to arrange stuff so that Neal had a flat area to sleep.  It was probably still rather chilly for him though.

So, those were our adventures on our next-to-last full day of our spring break road trip.

Another Day of Driving

Saturday, April 18, 2009

So, like April 12, this was a big driving day as we headed all the way from Andorra to Fontainebleau.  At least this time, we had the radio.

When we left Andorra in the morning after breakfast at the hotel, Nick was trying to lobby to spend an extra day there for skiing, because the rainstorm yesterday in the southern half of Andorra had dumped a lot of snow on the mountains in the northern half of Andorra.  I’m not a big skier, though, and I wanted to make sure the roads were going to be clear after we went through the mountain pass and started to descend on the north side of the mountains.  So, instead, I just took a few pictures on the drive out.

 

 

 

After that, Nick and I drove and drove and drove.  At one point we saw a Moulin Rouge.

Eventually, about two hours before dark, we finally arrived at a rainy campsite in Fontainebleau that we hadn’t been to before.  We were hoping that we might find some OUMC friends there, but we didn’t have any way of communicating with them (it turned out that some of them had been stopped by some sort of ferry/port strike and hadn’t even made it to France, anyway).  So we set up the tent in the rain, and cooked dinner under a little tarped-over cooking area they had.  I was pretty grumpy about all the rain.  But at least it had showers (it seems like almost all pay-for campgrounds I’ve been to in Western Europe have showers, which is nice, even if the showers themselves are often kind of yucky – these ones had lots of spiders).

So that was a pretty boring day, complete with rain at night (which convinced Nick that we definitely should have stayed in Andorra to ski).  But that was our day.

Return to Andorra

So, as I promised, I will continue to tell the stories about my last few days of my France and Spain trip back in April.  You will recall that I left off with my adventures on Thursday, April 16, 2009.  Moving on to:

Friday, April 17, 2009

Today, when Nick and I woke up, it was still pretty overcast.  It cleared up as we packed up our stuff and checked out.  We weren’t sure whether we should do a token final climb before we left Siurana, but we were actually pretty ready to go and anxious to get back to Andorra early enough to have some more time to look around.  So we headed out along the carsickness-inducing roads.

The first hour of driving out of Siurana was by far the worst, in terms of feeling like I was going to puke, so Nick and I stopped several times.  First we stopped to take a photo of some of the scenery.

Eventually, the roads started to straighten out, but I still felt pretty bad so we stopped in the center of a town to look around.  One of the guys who was sitting in the center plaza came up to talk to us.  He was intrigued because I was wearing shorts and he thought it was so cold.  (It actually was probably only about 60F but I was determined to wear my shorts anyways.)  So he had to come see where we were from.  He was more interested in Nick’s story because I guess he had spent some time working in England.  Meanwhile I took some photos of the chapel and the plaza.

After that, we finally got the radio working again.  Nick’s housemate had come through and texted us the radio code we needed to get it working again (and Nick promptly wrote it on the back of the removable radio piece so that he would never be without it again).  It took us a while to actually successfully enter it because I had made a few incorrect guesses based on what I remembered, which apparently was a bad idea because for every incorrect guess, the amount of time before you can enter your next guess increases.  So I was worried we would need to have like a week of no entering – but we eventually were able to successfully enter what we needed to.  Nick was thrilled to have the radio back (because when we hadn’t had it, I had just put on my iPod headphones and sung out loud what I was hearing).

Then I took a nap, because I still felt kind of carsick.  When I woke up, we were probably only about an hour from Andorra, and I felt much better.  We were driving through the flooded region that I had noticed on the way down to Siurana, too.

Soon after that, though, we were at the Andorra border, which we passed through quickly.

By this point, it was 2 or 3pm, and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so we went to a giant sells-everything store right after we crossed the border top pick up food to make lunch with.  Because of Andorra’s history as a tax-haven, even though it was similar to a Carrefour hypermarket in style, there was a heavy emphasis there on alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate, and jewelry.  Nick made a bee-line for the alcohol; I focused on the chocolate.  Eventually, besides some normal food supplies for breakfasts and lunches for the next few days, we ended up getting whisky for Nick and orange-infused Absolut vodka for me (it was like a large bottle for less than 10 euros – which is apparently extremely cheap).  We also got some chocolate and some candy, including a giant package of gummy worms.  Pretty good.

By the time we left the grocery store, it had actually started pouring rain.  We drove to the hotel (we were staying at the same hotel we had stayed at on the way down through Andorra; we figured that was our best bet because it was cheap and we knew where it was – on the way down, the GPS had gone haywire, and we didn’t want to drive all around Andorra trying to find a new hotel), checked in, and went up to our room.

We waited a little while for the rain to drop off, and ate (a very late) lunch.  Then we drove into Andorra la Vella to walk around and find a good place for dinner.  We wandered around for a little while to see our restaurant options (it had started to clear up by this point), and eventually picked a tapas place (since I had been whining that I wanted tapas).  Plus, because we had had a late lunch, we weren’t starved (Nick is generally skeptical of tapas because he’s worried he won’t get enough food).  It turned out to be really good – we sort of guessed at interpreting the menu, but did a good job and picked some really good stuff.  So that was good.

We went back to the hotel after dinner and opened some of the booze from the hypermarket.  Nick had whisky, and I made an interesting mixed drink out of the orange-infused vodka and cranberry juice.  It sounds weird, but it tasted just like Smarties (the American ones, not the English ones).  It also tasted really good with the gummy worms.

So that was our trek back up to Andorra!  Stay tuned for more – there’s still four more days of this trip to blog…

Finishing Up

Well!  I guess this is one of those “sorry-I-haven’t-posted-in-a-while” posts.  I want to finish up my old spring break stories, because they were good ones, and then finish up my England blog (since, after all, I’m now back from England).  I spent July working, and I’m back in school for my final semester at the start of September.  So stay tuned for the next couple days!