Time to do something different: find the spot on the Sant Maurici lake where I took a picture several years ago, then back to stay at a fancy-ish hotel with air conditioning.
We headed out after brekkie upriver towards Catalunya--not over the mountains, but just upriver, to this tiny part of Spain that's north of the Pyrenees crest called the Val d'Aran which isn't really culturally Spanish or French or Catalan, but Aranese, even down to their own dialect of Occitan (or Gascon) which is called Aranese. (probably got some of that incorrect, but having four languages in use in a small area gets confusing).
I had gone through this area in 2011 on a solo driving trip after attending Madrid Pride, and thought it was pretty interesting: a tunnel from the south side of the mountains, Vielha, the largest town, and then up and over a spectacular road past a ski area and down to a national park, where I stopped at a lake and took a picture. That's our objective today--go to that lake.
Well, in 15 years things have changed. There weren't many crowds back in 2011, so I drove up to the lake. Not this time--it's now a 4km hike up, unless you park in the village and get a local taxi to the lakeshore. We drove past a large parking lot and a lot of windows selling taxi tickets, ugh, can't we just walk instead of participating in this make-work village project?
Followed the signs to the park, drove up a narrow one lane road, aha this is why there's this
taxi-thing, maybe? Where are all the other visitors? Ended in a parking lot, maybe 100 cars.
Put on our boots and started walking to the lake, plenty of people. The usual beech forest and
stream at first, but then fir trees and other conifers and it smelled pretty good. Looked like
the California Sierras.
Got to the lake, took a picture, back down to the car, and down to the gas station at the turnoff. Can we take the long way around to the south back to Vielha? Uh, the Google is telling use there's a wildfire down there, with red traffic, so no.
So just back to the hotel, spotted a small wildfire high up on a mountain behind the hotel. Hm, the theme of this European summer: heat and fire. The room was great, nice view over the valley, took a nap, was going to write this on the table on the room's balcony but smoke had settled into the valley so no thank you, I'll stay in the room's AC. A welcome drink from the bar, now waiting for dinner.
A pretty decent day, and happy to have a car and be exploring more, and not in the smoke and heat.