the Norse farce [amazoning]

[Warning: This (silly) post is completely unrelated with the previous one!]

Last week, when biking back from ENSAE on the Plateau de Saclay, one strap of my (recent, grey, handy) North Face backpack gave way and I barely avoided a crash! The stitching at the top had unravelled, it appears, and there was no way I could fix it myself. Once safe at home, I thus called Amazon from whom I had bought it less than a year ago and was quite impressed by their handling of the matter, as they reimbursed me almost instantaneously. (Which brings the customary reminder and warning that my Amazon links are connected to my Amazon Associate account and [modest] benefits.) Anyway, this led me to concretise a pun I thought of a long while ago, namely to build a pastiche of the North Face logo where the Half-Dome representation would be turned into the half of a Viking helmet… My daughter Rachel helped me to turn this into an actual output, as shown above, but I would welcome proposals of alternative designs. The winner (if any) gets a free mug with the selected design!

walking the PCT

The last book I read in the hospital was wild, by Cheryl Strayed, which was about walking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) as a regenerating experience. The book was turned into a movie this year. I did not like the book very much and did not try to watch the film, but when I realised my vacation rental would bring me a dozen miles from the PCT, I planned a day hike along this mythical trail… Especially since my daughter had dreams of hiking the trail one day. (Not realising at the time that Cheryl Strayed had not come that far north, but had stopped at the border between Oregon and Washington.)

The hike was really great, staying on a high ridge for most of the time and offering 360⁰ views of the Eastern North Cascades (as well as forest fire smoke clouds in the distance…) Walking on the trail was very smooth as it was wide enough, with a limited gradient and hardly anyone around. Actually, we felt like intruding tourists on the trail, with our light backpacks, since the few hikers we crossed were long-distance hikers, “doing” the trail with sometimes backpacks that looked as heavy as Strayed’s original “Monster”. And sometimes with incredibly light ones. A great specificity of those people is that they all were more than ready to share their experiences and goals, with no complaint about the hardship of being on the trail for several months! And sounding more sorry than eager to reach the Canadian border and the end of the PCT in a few more dozen miles… For instance, a solitary female hiker told us of her plans to get back to the section near Lake Chelan she had missed the week before due to threatening forest fires. A great entry to the PCT, with the dream of walking a larger portion in an undefined future…