08/25/2023 Bikepacking Spain Day 17 : Wet Ride or Plush Hide?

Janet and I sat indolently in the grass on our hillside perch, me wearing only boxers, periodically dousing myself with water to mitigate the high temperatures. Without much battery power, we talked with each other instead of retreating to our phones. Suddenly, I felt a change - the wind slightly shifted and within minutes the air cooled to a comfortable temperature. No rain was predicted, but I said to Janet: “It feels like it is going to rain”. I took this intuition partly seriously and closed the bike bags… but didn’t believe my gut enough to put the rain fly on as well. Sure enough, 2 hours into our slumber, I woke to water on my face. It had actually been raining for a little while, but neither of us took notice. I hurriedly put the rainfly on in the dark - difficult to do well when you have just come out of stage 4 sleep! 💤

Record breaking heatwaves are…. well, up until today ongoing in Europe. In this part of France, the last few days have had temperatures higher than ever recorded this late in the year. The heatwave broke suddenly last night, and did a dramatic U-turn - into non-stop rain for the foreseeable future. It is tempting to complain about how the skies have been washing the fun out of our trips, but instead I want to tell you something else: A story about when scientists had Voyager 1 turn around to take a photo of the Earth before it left the solar system…. 🌏

This is the photo taken by Voyager of our home. Below, I’ll paste 5 paragraphs of Carl Sagan’s reflections on this Pale Blue Dot. I think about these words often, and believe they are amongst the most important words ever read by Earthlings. “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 🌎

… whew, that was deep… space... But bringing it back to the little things in life… the atoms, molecules, and neurotransmitters…. the caffeine carnival begins to unfold; we ponder the absurdity of being sentient sacks of atoms, finding profound purpose in a cup of liquid exhilaration. It's as if the universe sprinkled its own special blend of stardust to turn us into frothy philosophers, deeply contemplating the meaning of life… So once we came off the wet mountain and caffeine did it’s magic, everything seemed OK again and we began searching online for somewhere to stay dry… 🌟

Google Street view can be slightly helpful in verifying if a mountain “refugio” is going to be a comfortable place to sleep or not. We slowly arrived at the decision that comfort wouldn’t be found in this “free stay” tonight. Instead of doing a “wet ride,” we opted for “posh hides” and reserved a nicer than usual (for us) place to stay out of the rain for the next 3 days. It’s only money after all, and in light of the Pale Blue pixel, it seemed best to treat the bags of atoms that we have control over to some rest.

That must have been some good coffee. Now I want to brew some.

Dean G.