Rest days - France

All climbers need rest days. Rest days to go shopping for food and supplies. Rest days to read guidebooks to plan the next climbing days. Rest days to explore the local area. Rest days to check out the climbing shops. And I guess, rest days just to rest.

Some people climb for 2 days, then have 1 day off. Some people climb for 3 days then have one day off. And some climb for 4 days then have one day off. It depends on how long, how hard and how much you are climbing. The longer the climbs, the more often you need to rest; the more routes you climb, the more often you need to rest; and the more difficult the climbing, the more you need to rest. Anyway, in one year, we should have at least 3 months worth of “rest days”. That’s quite alot of resting.

I love our rest days. Sometimes we grab the frisbee and throw it around, or try to get better at slacklining (walking on a tightrope) or play boule or do yoga. And sometimes we just sit in a cafe or at the campsite talking about anything and everything. Some of the cafes are really nice, they don’t mind you eating your croissants and brioche and they have free wifi, which is perfect. Sure beats paying 1 euro for 10 minutes!

Of course we have to do our food shopping on rest days too, to satisfy our endless appetites. E.Leclerc has been our favourite supermarket so far. E.Leclerc is pronounced “leclair” in French – like chocolate eclair. My first attempt at saying it though sounded like “Lee Clerk” which no French person understood of course, and which Nic laughed at and corrected. Then, when we met some Aussies here, and Nic was talking about it, they had no idea what he was talking about, until I said “Lee Clerk”, and they understood, and said they had nicknamed it Electric! E. Leclerc along with Lidl seems to have the cheapest best value food in France. But when we are feeling a bit flushed up with cash, we go to the local market to select some new cheese we haven’t tried before, some local wine, some saucisson, some patissiere, some fruits and veg....

Rest days also mean more time to prepare food and cook. After a big days climbing, cooking can get a little dull because you are tired, but we managed to make a few different breakfasts on rest days... omelletes and crepes hmmm and cook a few awesome dinners like our woodfired bbqs and homemade pizzas. One rest day, to our surprise, the frisbee proved not only to be fun to throw around, but to be the perfect utensil for fruit picking. By throwing it at the blackberry tree, we made all the fruits fall onto our tarp so that we could pick them up easily, pour them into a saucepan, and then make some yummy blackberry jam. Beats picking them one by one! Miam Miam!