We had a brief thunderstorm last night, before we went to sleep. It lasted all of 5 minutes but it was still a great temperature from then on. We woke up and it was actually cold. I put a fleece on, for what felt like the first time that I wasn’t also doing laundry where it is the only top I have to wear. The weather was supposed to be cooler for the next 3 days. ...

The days are so long, I often think of things I want to include in each blog post and by the end of the day, I’ve forgotten them. No, I’m not going to make a note throughout the day. The daily posts at the end of each day is enough work as it is. Last night was another excellent night’s sleep: no cow bells, no wind. What more could you ask for? Today was supposed to be easier, no longer an “E” rated day but a 2. So it was 2 steps down in the rankings but I’d give it just one down, a 3. ...

We slept so well last night. What a relief. It was so quiet, calm, and cool. That was the best I could have hoped for prior to our last, “hardest” day. Our guidebook assigns a difficulty to each day: 1, 2, 3, or E. Why E and not 4? No idea. It makes it sound more intense maybe. Anyway, today was our last “E” day of the whole trek. It struck me as a bit odd that when we passed the halfway point early in the day, we were also doing the last, hardest day. So the hardest days were essentially all in the first half, but for some reasons the author argued against walking this trail the other way. It would seem to me that maybe getting in shape for those days in the first half might be useful, but what do I know? ...

Wow, what a night. That was, by far, our worst night’s sleep on trail this trip. It’s like I had a newborn that was my tent and the crying was the wind. When we pitched the tent for the night after our exhausting day, the wind wasn’t too bad. We were on an extremely hard surface, so rather than hammer the stakes into the ground, I laid rocks on top of the stakes to hold them in place. Now what you need to know is that we have what is known as a non-free standing tent. This means the tent doesn’t have one of those spine-like structures that you assemble by connecting the bungee-cord tent pole segments. Our tent uses trekking poles for loft, and then relies on tension with the stakes in the ground to hold it up. If you remove a stake, part of the tent collapses. If you’re wondering why we have a tent like this, it’s because they’re typically lighter, especially if you’re carrying trekking poles anyway. ...

Two fairly big back to back days. I said we were planning to ramp up a bit but this was a lot. I think we left camp around 7:30 and didn’t get into our current camp until 19:00. We woke up to smoke. The winds blew in smoke overnight and we have no idea from where. We don’t have any knowledge about fires and no idea where to go to find out. Something to do the next time we’re in town. Hopefully we don’t forget. ...

Today the mountains bled. We caught a hitch from Bielsa back to trail minutes after we started trying. We were late getting started because we had a bunch of logistics to handle. The hard part about always traveling and not having a home base is you always have to have a plan for what comes next. You don’t finish a trip or an adventure and go back home. You have to have a plan for what’s next, always. And if you book travel last minute, you pay a hefty penalty. So you have to know what you will want to do, where you will want to be, and how you will get there, sometime before your current adventure ends, the earlier the better. That’s what we spent the morning doing: figuring out where we will go after the HRP, how we’ll get there, and how long we’ll stay. It’s hard to do all that from a phone. We much prefer to do it from laptops, but we don’t have those, and when we did, we had no clue when we’d finish the HRP. Now, nearly three weeks in, we feel like we can make a semi-educated guess about when we’ll finish. So we spent several hours in our hotel room this morning booking that from our phones. ...

We didn’t walk today. Well we walked a little bit we didn’t hike, so we call it a zero day, as in zero miles. Last night we stayed in a campground and that was fine, but maybe not worth 28€ to pitch a tent. We took showers, got to do laundry, charged our devices, and got some spotty WiFi though. It’s hard for me to adjust to, given you can basically get showers, laundry, charging, and WiFi often for $15 in the U.S. when hiking. Usually the charging and WiFi are just free and easy to come by, with the other two. Here, we often have to separately seek out something. ...

I slept in again. It’s funny how sleeping in is 6:30. When you live your life largely by the hours of the sun, sleeping past sunrise feels like sleeping in. However, going to sleep before sunset is almost guaranteed out here. We woke up and were surprised to see several people ahead of us on the trail as we were packing up. Where did these people come from?! No one came by at all yesterday, and we were there since 17:00. I guess it was Saturday but I thought this route might be more obscure. It turns out, it’s not uncommon for other routes to use this same start. ...

We slept in a hour today. It was windy when we set up the tent so we were careful to stake it down as best we could. That paid off and we both slept quite well, despite the smell of poo from the field we were in wafting through occasionally. We planned to do a summit in the morning that would take 4 hours round trip. When we hiked to the junction to start the peak, we looked up, thought more about it, and decided against it. It didn’t seem like it would have afforded much better views that we were going to get on the normal route anyway. ...

We got to the Rifugio last night that we assumed was free but actually cost money to camp. We were some of the last people to pitch our tents and our location near the front door to the hut wasn’t optimal. We talked until late in the night, then some rain came in the night and I had to make adjustments to the tent since we almost always sleep with the doors open. I had to do some restating by headlamp. There was also a helicopter flying overhead when I was trying to go to sleep. I also woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t sleep so I started working on the photos for this blog. Then when I tried to go back to sleep, some children woke up with maximum energy and started running around our tent. I started the day wanting a nap. Or some tea since it was finally cool enough to support a hot beverage. ...