You will remember my
writing about the huge amount of snow that fell in the mountains over the
winter. La Pierre St. Martin, where I went yesterday, instead of its usual 3m
(10ft.) of snow, had 10m (33ft.) Well,
now it is melting and there have been terrible floods. President Hollande
visited the area the day before yesterday.
Houses, cars, roads,
bridges and people have been swept away, including a friend of a friend. Luz
St. Sauveur and Cauterets have been cut off, the roads to them having been
wiped out. And when I say “wiped out” I don’t just mean under water or the
surface having been loosened, I mean caverns gouged out under the road. It
will be months before things are back to normal, whatever that now is.
You can see details
on Ecolorado Rafting’s Facebook page. Take a look at the 18 minutes of French
TV footage which is linked to there.
My trip to La Pierre
St. Martin was to take part in the annual “Montagne Propre” (mountain cleaning)
day where volunteers go up into the ski resorts to clear away the rubbish left
at the end of the skiing season. This is certainly worth doing not just for
cleanliness but also because of the breakfast and lunch which are provided and
the free discount card for the following season. I should also say that, in the
two years that I have done it, it has provided a beautiful sunny experience
high in the mountains wandering around and not working particularly hard. It
has also provided the opportunity to visit a station which was previously
unknown to me.
La Pierre St. Martin
is a bit further than I would normally go for a day’s skiing but, having
finished fairly early and with it being only 7km from the Spanish frontier, I
thought I would pop into Spain and get some essential supplies (i.e. cheaper
wine). I drove down to Roncal but found a) there was no suitable store and b)
that it was siesta time and nothing was open. I therefore decided to take a
trip along some country roads through the Pyrenees and return to France through
the Somport Tunnel which we had last used 3 and a half years ago when we went
down to Andalusia. It was an interesting, twisting and rather tiring road to
drive, which abruptly deteriorated when I left Navarra and entered Aragón. There
were lumps of fallen rock all over the road to catch the unwary and mess up
their wheel-tracking. I think I may also have taken a wrong turning somewhere
(the Spanish do not always put up signs at the entrance to villages) and
arrived in Jaca – where I hadn’t particularly intended to go – from an
unexpected direction. However, there was a supermarket there and I was able to
stock up on wine and olive oil.
At 255 miles it was a
longish day and all spent at a constant 22 degrees, so not a bad day in all.
(Sorry about the lack
of photos. I forgot the camera.)
Saarema Island (in Estonia) was also a down-time. We found the only caravan site on the island. It turned out to be a battle site between the retreating Germans and the Russians in WWII. Estonians on both sides having been forced by circumstance into whichever army was in power at the time. However we walked on the beaches and paddled in the shallow baltic seas and looked at the swans on the water. The was a weekend long wedding party at the camp site in the Fire House which is a modern version of the Hall Beowulf entertained Grendal in I think! Saaremaa was off limits when the Russsians used it as a military base until 1991 so pretty untouched. I did enjoy myself.
