Bob:

Back to West Longitude! After another Nice breakfast, we packed up, checked out, and wrestled the car out of its tomb. Convinced by the bright, sunny, and dry weather that it would be fun to drive the scenic mountain routes, we headed west on N 260 to Sort, Spain, on what was truly a very scenic stretch of road. We were driving along a lesser ridge of the Pyrenees, but the huge, snow-draped ridges that separate Spain from France loomed majestically just to the North of us. I had the road pretty much to myself, so I could dawdle along and take all the curves (and there were a lot of them!) at the recommended speed, which was low enough that I always felt safe and fully in control of the car.

We arrived in Sort and had only the choice of driving North to France or South to La Pobla de Segur, so we chose the latter. We were following the river in the center of the valley downstream, and both the signs and trailers with multiple kayaks indicated that white water rafting was one of the valley's attractions. That was also when I encountered the first tour buses of the day, which was about as welcome to me as encountering logging trucks on the roads in the western wilderness in the U.S.A. Especially on roads with switchbacks or 180 degree hairpin curves, the tour buses (or logging trucks, for that matter) have to take more than one lane of the road to get around the curve, and that necessarily leaves less than one lane of the road for everybody else including myself. That makes the driving exciting, but in all the wrong ways.

Monika:

Bob:

At La Pobla de Segur, we turned due West toward Puente de Montanana on a very narrow, twisting road. It was so narrow, in fact, that it didn't really have a full two lanes and probably because of that I lost the center stripe that had marked the lanes up to that point. Besides offering great views of the mountains to the North and South of us, I figured, correctly as it turned out, that the road was just too narrow to allow tour buses to use it. What I didn't figure, of course, was that such a narrow, twisting mountain road was just the sort of road that the local motorcycle club would use for their Saturday morning drive. I had been driving along all by myself for about 20 minutes, fat, dumb, and happy, when all of sudden ROOOOAAAARRRR went a motorcycle past my side mirror at about 80 mph (I was doing 40 at the time).

I had just recovered from that surprise when about 20 of his cohorts came roaring up on me like a swarm of angry bumblebees and I spent the next 10 minutes driving ever so carefully until they all passed me safely. I wasn't worried about us, really, but since I have been a young and foolish motorcyclist I was trying very hard to not make contact so that they could remain in control and stay alive. Despite my best efforts, one dingbat cut in so close as he passed me on a tight curve that I felt his riding suit brushing my left front fender as he cut right in front of me. Fortunately it was a light brush and he maintained control, so there was no accident. I expect he would later brag about it to his buddies; I remember being young and invulnerable like that, but somehow over the decades that feeling seems to have worn off.

After all that excitement I could once again start looking around at the scenery whenever I wasn't throwing the car around a curve. What Monika and I both enjoyed were the teeny, tiny towns just clinging to the sides of the mountains here and there. You really wonder how the folks manage to scratch a living from the bare mountainsides and how they put up with being cut off by snow for weeks in the winter. I expect you get to know your neighbors really well, and as long as you do in fact like those neighbors I guess it isn't too bad.

Monika:

Bob:

At Puente de Montanana we continued West on N230 to Benabarre and then N123 to Barbastro. We were just coming out of the foothills of the Pyrenees and we thought that "all the good scenery was over for the day" when we suddenly drove into a magnificent river gorge. We were taken by surprise and Monika didn't get the camera up in time to take any pictures, so I took advantage of a pull off just before the first tunnel, and boy were we glad we did. Although this turn off was not marked in any special way, a small rocky trail led about 100 feet to an ancient stone bridge high over the green waters of the river roaring in the gorge far below.

The gorge at that point was vary narrow, maybe 50 feet across, and I was not inspired with confidence by that ancient masonry bridge with cobblestones sticking up on the walkway surface and whole stones missing from the sides. Still, from the middle of the bridge we could look directly down on the green roaring river below, which was a fascinating sight. The view downstream through the narrow cleft in the mountains was just magnificent. The steeply cut gorge reminded me the Royal Gorge in Colorado where the Colorado River flows through a cleft in the Rocky Mountains (Wanderung 3) or the gorges in Big Bend National Park cut by the Rio Grande (Wanderung 11), but on a much smaller scale than either of those, of course.

Coming back across the bridge, we found that the pebble path continued for a while along the edge of the cliff at the edge of the gorge. Although there were no railings the government had thoughtfully provided plastic-coating stainless steel cable on the side of the mountain for us to hold on to while edging our way along the cliff. Well, it was better than nothing, but since I was using one hand for the camera I had only one hand for the cable and I wasn't entirely sure that I could arrest my slide over the cliff with just one hand. But as a reward, once we had worked our way around a couple of bends in the mountain the views upstream were truly grand. Still, walking along 1 foot from disaster tends to give me a queasy feeling, so we turned back and continued driving to Barbastro.

Monika:

Bob:

From Barbastro we headed west by northwest on N240 to Huesca where we had planned to stay the night. Disdaining a nice looking hotel at the exit, we stopped to buy some groceries at a Lidl store and then plunged on into town hoping to find a local Information Centre and do a careful, rational assessment of the town's hotels before choosing one. No rational act goes unpunished, and we got not what we deserved, perhaps, but maybe what we should have expected. We did indeed find signs for an Information Centre, and those signs led us on a merry chase straight into the narrow, twisting, one-way streets of the old town. The final sign told us to turn up an alley from which we had no choice but to go through more narrow alleys, a construction zone, and then more alleys before we were finally spit out onto something that could with charity be called a street. We never saw any further sign of the chimerical Information Center and we were, as a result of all this, quite thoroughly lost.

I wandered around the labyrinth of one-way streets in old town Huesca for a while before we decided to bag it and return to that hotel we had seen at the exit, which in retrospect was starting to look better and better. In the end we had to exit the city to Zaragossa, not because we wanted to go to Zaragossa but because we had no idea how else to get out of the old town district. Then with the aide of the GPS we worked our way back around the modern perimeter of the city and finally did get back to the Hotel MonteAragon. Thank goodness they had a room for the night because by this time I was frazzled and quite tired of driving. In fact, our room once again was a "room with a view", in this case a view of an old church up on a hilltop about a mile to the northeast. Even better, our hotel had free WiFi, so we started up the computer and check in to see if any friends or relatives had been emailing us. Answering the email, bringing our respective journals up to date, downloading and processing pictures from the camera, and just relaxing and reading took up the rest of the afternoon.

Monika noted that the Lidl store would close by 8 p.m. and probably not be open on Sunday, so we broke off to shop for some groceries for Sunday's meals. It turned out to be far easier to stay on a low-fat diet in Spain by shopping than by eating out. If we searched very carefully in stores, we could find skimmed milk, and low fat yogurt, cheese, and slices of turkey, chicken and ham. In contrast, the hotel and restaurant meals never offered anything other than whole milk, the vegetables usually seemed to be dipped in butter, and many of the appetizers and entrees were deep fat fried. To us, at least, it appeared that the idea of a low fat diet was simply not on the radar screen for Spanish cuisine, just as it was also absent in French cuisine during Wanderung 10. We also prefer to eat a very small evening meal around 6 p.m., which was much smaller and definitely much earlier than the Spanish folks seemed to want to eat. Hence, we ended up eating some of our low fat groceries from Lidl that evening in our hotel room, after which we read for a while and then turned in for the night.

Monika: