FOMO. Never a good thing. ”Fear Of Missing Out” has caused me to get myself into many situations and commitments that later I may have ended up regretting. While on our recent trip back home to South Africa I did manage to spend the evening with my Jade climbing the iconic Lions Head for a spectacular sunset and had such a surreal run through beautiful Silvermine with my friend Timony. But ultimately with all the time commitments, the trip fell short of delivering on all our hiking plans. While I felt the loss of missing out on some of our Cape Town local favourites, such as Devils Peak and Kloof Corner, the choice to spend time with my people was my priority. Besides, lugging bikes from Spain meant that any exercise time needed to be of a cycling nature.
When back in Catalunya I heard my mother-in-law was heading into the mountains outside Worcester for the weekend, my dreaded FOMO kicked in and I quickly became determined to find an equally beautiful hike for us. The research (the best part!) began and I was quickly delighted to find several worthy candidates. Our one challenge always being the lack of transport to enable our “away from the sea” ideas, especially if it's further away than our bicycles can realistically take us. While the European rail system is exceptional, it seldom drops me off at the door of where I want to be. At this stage, I do appreciate driving your own car and climbing in it without a thought.
And so Congost (the gorge of) Mont Rebei became the chosen hike and obtaining transport to the area, located in the Pyrenees, was the next task. Fortunately, I found a car rental company in Barcelona at a reasonable price - ok cheap :-). Unfortunately, and true to nature, I forgot to read the fine print (it didn’t help that it was in Spanish). With great excitement, I clicked “book car'' on the web and paid with Kevin’s credit card (even greater excitement, using his credit card :-)). Doing so with me as the registered driver. Kevin’s driver’s licence has expired and two months in South Africa was not enough time to get it renewed as the sole licence card printing machine in the entire country has been out of action since November. Apparently, the entire machine had to be packaged and shipped to Europe for repairs and this has created a backlog affecting millions of South Africans - go figure. Also, let’s just point out that I am a little out of practice when it comes to driving a car (who would have thought it’s so different to sailing a yacht?) and I had my family in South Africa screaming multiple times ''you’re on the wrong side of the road again!” So I wasn’t looking forward to having to adapt back to Europe again.
The day of the trip arrived and we started before what can respectively be called “bright and early” with a brisk and fresh walk in 5-degrees before sunrise, the two kilometres to the train station. We arrived at the car hire collection point in Barcelona, after an 80-minute train trip, just before 7 am. But things seldom go as planned. Through a broken Spanglish dialogue with the car hire company, they insistently informed us that, as it states in the fine print (yes the one in Spanish that I comfortably ignored), the deposit needs to be paid with a credit card in the name of the registered driver - oops, me - regardless of who paid for the booking.
By 7.30 am we had (still in our broken Spanglish) exhausted all escalation and other options to learn that in Spain: 1) you cannot change the registered driver after collection time, 2) adding Kevin as a second driver wouldn’t help, and 3) we couldn’t cancel that rental and create a new one, with Kevin as the registered driver, without incurring penalties and so on. In fact, if we wanted to extend our trip by a day or two, we would have to come back to Barcelona to drop the car off and then rent a new one. I wonder if their systems come from the same company as the South African drivers' licence printer…
The only option left was two more 80-minute train trips for Kevin, heading back to the boat, collecting my credit card, and returning, while I waited away the time in a sidewalk Barcelona cafe. A little wired from three cups of coffee and we eventually got underway after 11:30 am.
Determined to remain calm and excited we headed off. With a three hour plus drive ahead of us to the slopes of the Pyrenees, and an 8-hour hike ahead of us, we were grateful that we had booked overnight accommodation so that we could shift the start to the next day. Arriving late afternoon at our truckers lodge on a barren back road in the middle of nowhere, as there isn’t much choice pre-season and I am clearly never going to apply as a travel agent - we dropped our luggage and headed out for a stroll to acquaint ourselves with our surroundings and stretch our legs.
After an early night, we were ready at 6:30 am full of excitement and experienced a little apprehension upon discovering our accommodation was not offering breakfast as advertised - or at least not before 10:00 am (this is Spain after all). Having learnt from our Meteora hike in Greece, where we forgot to pack breakfast, we, fortunately, packed enough food for a week. You can imagine our shock and trepidation as while driving to the trailhead, the car registered -1 and we stopped on the side of the road to play on a frozen stream while wondering just how cold this hike was going to be. But being tough Saffers we forged forward in anticipation of what lay ahead.
Needless to say, the gorge was beyond our imagination and in every way as spectacular as we could have hoped for. Although I was a little disappointed that an 8-hour hike in a gorge with 1200m of ascent (that I was looking forward to based on the Wikiloc trail) was over in only 4 hours. On the upside, it was 6 kilometres further than advertised.
Not one to suffer from post-activity FOMO I insisted we swim in the freezing, icy blue waters - which despite Kevin's pitiful screams was well worth it.
That night, back in my bed on GypsyDjango, I reflected on what an amazing day out we had and fell asleep with a big smile on my face.
Returning the hire car the next morning we made the most of being back in Barcelona by going all touristy. We visited the Montjuic Fountains (that we never got to due to Covid lockdown last year) before treating ourselves to The Immersive Experience of Van Gogh show. How do we top these three days now?
It was a good choice to make this life change and it is one that enables us to explore Europe. What is even better is that we can do so because of the flexibility of living on GypsyDjango. I am more excited about what lies ahead and about being able to create adventures, taking advantage of seeing new places in a country where not everything is simple. This year I get to do this not only with very special friends who are coming to visit us at our home on the sea and experience our life with us but with family and that makes life even more special. So the little challenges we have and frustrations and awkward moments in a foreign country seem minuscule in comparison.
Oh and yes, life learnings? Google translate on Spanish fine print is always an option 😊.
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