0800 hrs, Toulouse Ibis
Oh, that was a wonderful nights sleep here at the Ibis at the Toulouse main train station. It's quiet here on the 4th floor, and the bed is wonderfully comfortable--and best of all, there is air conditioning, and it kept the room at a comfortable 22C all night .
The heat has been bad, which is obvious if you read the blog posts--it's not a dry heat. For our typical 16 to 18km walks (10 or 11 miles), we've been carrying about 4.5 liters of water. That's heavy, but we ran out of water on the third day and don't want that to happen again. What I haven't mentioned is that there is very little AC, just one place out of the 30 places we stayed at. Fans are very uncommon as well, the first place had a small table fan, and La Patio De Luchon actually had an oscillating pedestal fan, but nowhere else.
And it's been unusually hot here in southwestern France since mid-June. These buildings with the thick stone walls have been building up heat for six weeks or more; you can feel it in the morning on their shady sides, the air will be coolish and humid, but get close to the walls and you can feel the heat radiating from them.
This means sleep has been generally miserable, our room is generally around 30C (86F) when we go to bed, pillows and sheets end up soaked with sweat by midnight, and maybe it'll cool down a bit by 2 or 4am. Windows are always open as we go to sleep, and a cool shower helps for maybe 30 minutes.
It's exhausting. So we're just enjoying this cool (and large!) hotel room for once, will linger over breakfast, then pick up the rental car from Alamo around noon. And the rental car will have air conditioning, which these days shouldn't be a luxury anymore in France.
Picked up the car at noon and headed out. Stopped by the BMW Motorrad dealer (I'm always looking for a good pair of summer gloves), but wasn't ready to shell out €180 for this year's offering of elkskin gloves, though they looked and felt great; I have a pair of Aerostitch deerskin gloves that work just as well.
Onto the motorway, heading southwest back to the mountains, wondering how much the tolls would be (they were €8 total), and thinking the 130kph speed limit was decent. The countryside was parched, lots of trees turning brown and dropping crispy leaves and in several places reminded us of I-5 north of Sacramento. Not terribly scenic.
Arrived at our place to stay in Arlos, owner greeted us, sat outside after she served us a couple of beers. Yes, it was hot, 34C, we were in the shade. Good dinner of what we'd call a New York strip steak and steak fries.
Tomorrow was supposed to be a pleasant day walking to a refuge, but rain and thunderstorms and lightning are forecast. It's Sunday, so looking around we found a decent hotel in Vielha, maybe 20 min south in Val d'Aran, so we'll take that instead of hiking a 30km loop. We're both feeling a bit more worn down that we'd like, so taking a couple more days of rest (and getting a decent night's rest) will be welcome.