Pam Is Right (As Always)
63.45 miles hiked, 3 Cultural Events Attended
The best laid plans… Well, you know the rest. Our intent was to get up early and head to Aigüestortes National Park for a hike. The name means twisted waters and it’s known for waterfalls and alpine hiking. However, we couldn’t get our lazy butts in gear so were a late getting out the door. We are on vacation, but we do need to get to those trails a little earlier in the morning.
We got to the park and had another surprise. We didn’t realize that the park doesn’t allow cars to park at the trail starting point. You must park five miles away and pay a licensed taxi to take you up. We had one of two choices, we could call for a taxi, which would take anywhere from 30-60 (or more) minutes to show up or walk the five miles ourselves. We’d wanted to do an 11-mile hike, so we were in a conundrum. I can’t understand why a park shuttle can’t be running back and forth instead relying on random taxi drivers. I guess the idea is to provide jobs, but it seems like a very inefficient system to me. When I say inefficient, I mean dumb.
It was a beautiful day, so we decided we’d walk up on the trail that weaves around the main river running through the park. Also, it was shadier than walking on the road. Every step of the way all you could hear was rushing water or waterfalls. We figured we would walk to the trailhead and continue as far as we had time.
Something that stuck in my mind was when we got on the trail a sign said it would take two hours to get to the trailhead (We did it in 2:10). I’d noticed on other hikes in Spain that instead of listing mileage, they would list a time. What’s stuck in my mind is, how do they figure out that number? Is it similar to a phone survey where they took 1,000 random people and averaged the time all of them took to walk the trail? Do they have a formula based on distance and altitude gain? Do they just draw a number out of a hat? I obsessed about this perplexing question for far too long. I’ll ask our super guide Alberto when we see him next and report the result.
About halfway up there was small Romanesque chapel of Sant Nicolau. According to local legends, there are numerous French kings’ crowns hidden in the valley. We did a lot of poking around and found them! However, we left them where they were because the other part of the legend is whoever touches them dies. If you want some serious bling, let us know in case you are feeling lucky.
We enjoyed the big waterfalls in the middle of the park, but all my photographs don’t capture their size. At the trailhead, there’s a Mirador (Lookout). Once thing we’ve learned about Spain in our earlier trips, if there’s a Mirador, the views are going to be worth it.
As we were taking a break at the trailhead to eat lunch, the clouds were getting thicker, and Pam said it was going to rain. I didn’t think so and said at most it would spit a little rain. In five minutes, it started spitting. Pam said it was going to rain, but I didn’t think so. A few minutes later, the spitting moved into drooling, so we got into our rain gear and our luscious waterproof socks. You can guess what happened three minutes later, it started to rain. When am I going to learn to listen to Pam?
We had fleeting thoughts of heading up the trail, but the thunder and lightning put an end to those thoughts, and we wisely started heading down. The rain got heavier, and then this happened:
Unlike most people with phones, I never think to make a video. In this case, I was so glad I did. It was only pea sized hail, but we waited it out under a pine tree in case it got bigger. We headed down quickly and in 15 minutes we were out of the rain. The rest of the walk was very pleasant, even when we had to cross a creek flowing across the road and the water was slightly over three inches deep. Those Randy Sun socks are amazing because our feet were dry after five miles. I swear we are not paid for these glowing reviews!
We got to laughing that we wished we had these waterproof socks on our Wales hike last year. We spent so much time looking for ways around or through bogs so we wouldn’t get our feet wet. All of those days would have been two hours shorter because all we did was look at ways to keep our feet dry, and they were all unsuccessful.
As I was preparing to take yet another flower picture, something flew into the frame. At first, I thought it was a hummingbird because it was hovering and behaving just like one. However, Europe doesn’t have any hummingbirds, but I’d read about moths that mimic the behavior of them. We couldn’t believe our luck, we got to watch a hummingbird hawk-moth! It’s an excellent example of co-evolution and if I hadn’t recalled this random factoid, we would swear it was a hummingbird.
We stopped in the tiny town of Barruera to stock up at their one grocery store, but it was still siesta time so visited their church to kill the 30 minutes. It was a very small church but had an altarpiece that was different. Back in the late 1600’s the style was to be as realistic as possible, especially with Jesus on the cross. You had to see every muscle, vein, and wound to appreciate his suffering. It was quite morbid.
On the way home, we finally got a picture of something we’ve wanted for the last few days. Since it’s a road sign, and Spain has no road shoulders or road pull outs, it was surprisingly hard to get.
The first time we saw this sign, we could not figure out why the cow is so weirdly proportioned. Those legs are much too short. My working theory is that Spanish farmers have figured out how to cross breed a cow with a corgi. We named these signs, corgicows. When we asked Alberto about them, it turns out the signs are proportioned correctly because they are pirenaica, the indigenous beef cow of north-eastern Spain. I’m going to start a petition to have them renamed corgicows because that’s funnier.
Pam asked me why I always thank all of you for reading at the end of these posts. It’s because you are my taskmasters, but in a good way! It would be so easy to say, I’m on vacation, the blog post could wait for tomorrow every night, and they wouldn’t get done. With you all reading (and commenting, thank you ❤️) it’s that little push I need to save these memories when they are fresh. For that, I will always thank you!
Cheers, John! Thanks for sharing! And congratulations to you for all you two are celebrating this year on this trip!
Did John find a crown? We could use it in an assemblage. Did you see any corgicows aside from the ones in the signs? I need to go back and read a few posts I missed. They are highly entertaining.