Pyrenean Perambulations

Andy Howell has been busy over at ‘Must Be This Way’ with inspirational postings about the Pyrenees, such as this FAQ posting.

Well done, Andy, the information you provide will be of great help to those planning on visiting this wonderful range of mountains.

I shall be trying (again) to encourage Gayle and Mick to hatch a Pyrenean traverse project when I see them tomorrow.

For my own part, I can add a little to Andy’s wealth of information by mentioning that Sue and I completed a HRP (Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne) crossing from west to east in 2004, in celebration of my release after many years from the shackles of full time work.

We set up a web page prior to the trip and sent a text message each day to our ‘webmaster’ (my daughter) who updated a spreadsheet with our progress to date.  A sort of rudimentary ‘blog’, though I wasn’t familiar with that term in 2004.  Was anybody?

After the trip we added a bit more information and copied a couple of days of our detailed diary to another web page, and showed the slides to a few people.

Later, I transcribed the postcards that we sent home every day (snail mail blogging?!) and have provided that document to a few people who have made contact during their preparations for a Pyrenean traverse.

Andy’s current efforts have triggered me into putting the postcard transcript onto a separate web page.  I hope to add some photos and perhaps reproduce a few more detailed diary entries, but for the present our main Pyrenean web page, with links to route details and a kit list (now a bit dated), is here, and the postcard transcript is here.

The photo at the head of this posting is the view from our wild camp at Col d’Ispeguy as the sun went down on 30 July 2004, on the fifth day of our crossing.

I hope someone may find all this of some interest (if only the link to Andy’s site).  The Pyrenees is a wonderful area to visit.

My other Pyrenean postings can be found here.