Great adventures…

“A journey of a thousand miles always begins with a first step”… It was Lao Tzu who said it, and he was undoubtedly right. A very small first step, a first repair facing the unfathomable mysteries of plumbing and… a first stop which turned into a 2 day break…

We were super ready! We had prepared an itinerary, we had calculated the distances, Marvin had had his medical examination and we had repaired 2 or 3 details, we had become pros in the art of fitting 6 months of clothes into a backpack.. All that remained was to leave…

For those who hibernated for a few months (or for the record, when someone will reread this text in a few years), the winter of 2023-2024 was, at least in the Pyrenees, a pure example of what awaits us in a few years thanks to climate change: spring temperatures in December and not a snowflake all winter! But there it was, it had to snow one day or another… And it was precisely on the eve of our departure that it had to fall! Forty centimeters of very wet, very sticky, very heavy snow… It was undoubtedly a sign…

Listening only to our courage (and the weather forecast which did not give much of these late snowflakes), we still cleared Marvin of its snow, loaded our belongings, checked a few last little details and… off we were for the great adventure!…

First stop: Ós de Balaguer… 🤔

Well, ok, the word “adventure” is perhaps a little overrated here… Let’s say that the landscape is not really very exotic, and for a good reason: we are only 150km away from home! And why so close? Because we had to find a place to spend our first night and, as a reminder, the idea of this trip is to do legs of a maximum of 200km per day. So there you go, Ós de Balaguer, its church, its main street (under construction at the moment) and… its Vilars cave, closed to the public by a pretty metal gate, at the foot of which we spent our first night…

All joking aside, the place is rather less bad than we imagined. A typical landscape of the pre-Pyrenees, on the border between Catalonia and Aragon, with Montsec in the background, fields of olive trees around us, and a climbing spot apparently quite well known, even if it is a bit difficult, from here, and as neophytes, to see a cliff imposing enough to be able to climb it…

The initial plan was to spend a night here before continuing to Navarre, but the unfathomable mysteries of plumbing decided otherwise. For those who missed an episode, Marvin is equipped with a bathroom with shower, a kitchen and a toilet, among other things, and all these little things consume water. So, Marvin is also equipped with a plumbing system (even if, in this case, it would be more “plastiquing” because, to meet standards, all the pipes must be flexible). We therefore have a whole range of pipes, valves, tanks, expansion tanks and… clamps that go with them. But yesterday evening, we realized that we had a small water leak in the compartment where all these elements are carefully installed. Not really Niagara Falls, but it’s always annoying to see that we lose water (especially when we only have a limited quantity).

This morning, therefore, it was operation “repair the leak”, which should only take around thirty minutes before we continue our journey… Except that, to repair a leak, you must first know where it comes from! And in our case, it took us an entire morning, tightening and then changing hose clamps, strategically positioning paper towels to see where they were getting wet, desperately trying to unscrew a screw whose head no longer had a shape, and finally decided that the simplest thing to do would be to completely replace an entire section of the installation, just to be sure…

The culprit of all this? A non-return valve that I decided to screw to the floor to organise the installation a bit. Except that… the valve in question was not designed for that at all, and the screw I added to it actually perforated the part of the valve that was previously waterproof. Hence the leak…

Add to this one of the outlets of the hot water supply which simply broke in two, and you get a happy morning of plumbing and mopping…

The good news is that the problem seems to have been fixed, and that tomorrow we will be able to resume the normal course of things and reach Navarre… To console ourselves, we can always find the excuse that today is March 14, Constitution Day in Andorra and therefore a public holiday… We really couldn’t drive to Navarre on a public holiday… 😉

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In ós de Balaguer, as anywhere else, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.