I couldn’t sleep for the last hour or so before 6 this morning. Maybe I was too rested, but I think it’s due to having internet access. My mind thinks of other tasks to do, or things to look up. It’s better not having access sometimes. Zoë woke up feeling good. She was back to having an appetite, eating without stomach discomfort, and not urgently needing a bathroom. We were good to go. ...

We spent the two days in the hotel mostly doing chores online. We researched future destination and made some reservations for the Fall. I sent off some emails and got some gear replaced through some warranties. Now I hate gear, mostly. It constantly disappoints me and usually breaks at the most inconvenient time, at least for long distance backpackers. It’s rare that a piece of gear doesn’t disappoint me. I’ll include a list of everything that failed or wore out on this hike in my summary at the end, but I would like to take a moment to highlight two excellent customer service encounters I had with gear failures: ...

Well I guess we pushed too fast, too soon. Zoë had an awful night and had to use the bathroom 5 times in the night. So I guess she’s not quite over whatever stomach bug got her almost a week ago. We made the easy decision to turn around and head back down to La Massana to spend at least 1 night there. How will we know how long to wait if she felt ok before, but ended up back here, with stomach issues? I don’t know. Maybe we’ll start with making sure she can eat normally again before we head back out. ...

We ended up with a wonderful campsite. It was incredibly quiet, and no animal poop in sight. The nearly full moon is hardly something we complain about much anymore. We just sleep with something over our eyes. If we don’t need ear plugs to sleep, it’s a pretty exceptional night out here. The HRP and probably the Pyrenees in general have a poop problem. I don’t mean the cow, horse, and sheep poop, even though I could do without those. No, I mean human poop. Specifically there is toilet paper all over the place, which is pretty gross. The Pyrenees do not lend themselves to digging cat holes. The ground is just too firm. There’s also a substantial amount of people hiking here, which is made easier by the refuges, staffed and unstaffed. However, there are only toilets at staffed refuges, which are not as frequent as parking lots. It’s gotten to a point where the governments of France and Spain probably need to commit resources to building privies in the Pyrenees, and all the maintenance that entails. Without it, the toilet paper problem is only going to get worse. ...

Last night at camp, the last person to show up was a girl hiking the opposite direction to all of us. She was just hiking for a couple of days and she was saying how she hates hiking alone. She missed having someone to talk to. In order to cope, she had resorted to talking to herself. She told us a bit of her external monologue which started off with “oh that’s nice, look at that,” and then devolved to, “why am I doing this? This sucks.” She said that it’s particularly nice when you’re hiking with someone and then you both get tired. She said that’s her time to shine, conversationally, because the other person is too tired to talk back much so she can just go on and on. We all thought that was pretty funny. ...

I didn’t really sleep in, but 7:30 for hikers is sleeping in. By the time I removed my buff from my eyes, nearly all of the tents around me were gone. Zoë was still asleep and since we didn’t have a plan, there was no sense in waking her up. When she did wake up, we were a bit unsure of what to do. She felt better, but not 100%. She hadn’t eaten much and didn’t have nearly her normal appetite. However, she was able to eat without problems and she hadn’t needed to take any medicine for about 24 hours. We could stay another day, and eat through another day of hiking food, which really isn’t great when you aren’t hiking. We could try hiking down an hour to the next town, which might have some food, but very limited. If we felt ok there, we could continue, and if not we could always come back. We tallied our food and found that we could probably make it the 3 days to our next town, particularly with reduced appetites. ...

Today was our unplanned zero day. We took a zero maybe a week ago, thinking it’d probably be our only one. Zoë woke up feeling not nearly well enough so we booked another night. I woke up feeling fine. I did all the things Zoë couldn’t do: laundry, cleaned our filters, moved the tent to a flatter spot, etc. It was all trivial for me to do and almost impossible for her and I was happy to do it. ...

A backcountry skill I didn’t know I needed was how to scare away a horse. Last night, amidst the nearly-full moon, some bells wandered over to our tent. Actually only a few of them had bells on, but one decided that the grass nearest our tent was the most delicious at the ungodly hour. It wasn’t the bells that woke me up, but the chomping so close to my head. I tried to scare it by you know, moving. I thought that might do it. Then giving it a “hey” but in kind of a whisper-yell because there was another tent not too far away. The horse stopped chewing and stared at me. Or it stared at the tent, I couldn’t tell. But it didn’t run. At one point Zoë got it to run a little bit away by moving and yelling but then it just came back. Annoyed, I put in my earplugs and tried to go back to sleep, hoping it wouldn’t accidentally step on me. Eventually they moved on. ...

It was delightfully cold last night. I even put my socks on. I contemplated zipping up the foot box of my quilt, but I couldn’t work up the motivation to do it once I was already horizontal. I justified it to myself by saying that the next night would be hot anyway, so there was no use it spending the 30 seconds doing it up for one night. Ridiculous, I know. ...

We slept extremely well and all plans to get up and leave early went out the window when we saw it was cold and foggy outside. We took our time getting ready, planned more logistics for after the hike, and eventually checked out. I loved that hotel, and our town stop was perfect. I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to go back to hiking. I wanted to stay in town and eat and be comfortable. But I knew the only way out of the town blues was to get back on trail for a day. ...