Bad weather
Just when it seemed summer had arrived, things took a turn for the worse. Just a week before, having started our mountain walk rather too late in the day, we’d found ourselves puffing up the final slopes of Pic Bicoutou in stifling heat and, later that evening, enjoying a mediterranean-style alfresco meal on the balcony back home. “That’s it,” I thought. “Spring is over; from now on it’ll be proper South of France type weather!” I can’t say we hadn’t been warned. France Meteo had been predicting storms, showers, rain, torrential rain and various combinations of the above for days. But they’d been wrong. The sun kept shining and, though the bad weather turned up as predicted, it was always somewhere else. I suppose we were lulled into a false sense of security. The writing was on the wall, however, when the first witch-like fingers of cloud curled up from the valley. This is not uncommon. Often they will insinuate themselves a little below the village just before dusk only to have slunk off again by dawn. This time, though, they were more persistent and, the next morning, pushing back the bedroom shutters we saw nothing beyond the church but a grey mist. They call this le brouillard and it’s really just cloud. Quite often, here, we are above it and, looking down from the mountains we will
Lescun with the cloud moving in - the start of the bad weather.