Day 44: L'Etang de Bassiès to Auzat

Letting the sun warm us and dry the tent before we emerged into the day, thousands of tiny crystal rainbows shimmering as the breeze blew through sunny dew drops on the long grass, the lakes below bathing in misty clouds, huge banks of soft pink heather spilling out between the giant silver boulders and soft yellow grass, dark green pine trees lined up like a Christmas tree parade, clouds dancing around distant peaks as I wandered and pondered it all trying to imprint the colours and light onto my mind's eye to keep forever and always, stumbling down dusty stone paths, leaving the GR10 and its weird North-South ways to go East, chasing speckled woods and red admirals and other pretties, a stupid bee flying into Gavin's boot and stinging his leg, a pretty floral village where Gavin had a close encounter with a kingfisher that flew off before I could spy it, wagtails wagging, dippers dipping, so many pumpkin patches, a peaceful campsite with a friendly dog, an absolutely amazing bottle of wine and dinner in the village which included a cheese course where the waitress just brought out half a huge cheese and let me slice as much I wanted... 

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The GR10 does weird things in the Arriège region: it has several confusing branches; it spends entire days taking you North and South rather than head East; it leads you through several ghost towns. After waking up to our tent freezing (again) we wanted to make some sort of progress before winter arrived, so we opted out of a huge North-South loop and followed a local path instead. This led us to a town called Auzat, where we set up camp in a very quiet campsite, Camping La Vernière and went out for a lovely meal in a restaurant in the village: La Tabled'Arconac. It had an entirely meaty menu and The restaurant were a little hesitant when it came to veggie options, but we managed to negotiate a rather tasty salad (I think it involved requesting that it came without ham, and the waitress offered to replace it with cheese or eggs). The noteworthy thing was the cheese course tho. Seriously, this is what I was presented with….

So good.

The vital statistics:
Total hiking time: 5h17
Peak: 1638m
Total ascent: 75m
Total descent: 984m