I still don’t know if what happened was real or if a collective paranoia that hit both my friend and I on this trip. One thing is sure, this trip felt like a backwood horror movie. I don’t want to scare y’all but this stuff needs to be documented, because I don’t want anyone to disappear over there.
It’s good to live in the great city of New Orleans, but to be honest, in November, I was starting to suffocate being stuck in town for so long. I needed a break. Lucky me, Thanksgiving was coming. I shared the idea to rent a cabin and spend a couple of days in the Louisiana Bayou or in Mississippi to some of my friends who were up for it. After many debates, we finally rented a lodge located not too far from Morgan City, LA.
Pretty sunset over the Highlands.
This was by no mean the toughest hike I’ve done, but I was extremely apprehensive to climb Ben Nevis by the CMD Arete in February. Ben Nevis was always described to me as a dangerous mountain to climb due the unpredictable Scottish weather conditions. As a matter of fact, a man had lost his life on the CMD not even a week before our trip to Fort William, which made the headlines of local news. Continue reading
The Angola Prison Rodeo is extremely famous in the Deep South. Every Sunday of October, a show is organized in the largest maximum security prison of the United States. Many people come from far away to attend it.
I am a different person, with a new prize in my bag. My physical appearance remains the same (besides a few more muscles in my legs), and one would probably not notice any difference simply by looking at me. My face has not changed, but if it were possible to peer in to my mind and travel to that one spot that took the brunt of the climb, one could see the beginning layer of a callous forming over the once soft-spot. A new page from my little brown book is full, which documents our hike up A’ Ghlas-bheinn, the friendly munro of the Kintail Mountains.
Mountains of the Big Bend Ranch State Park in sight
After some time spent in Sanderson, looking for a local restaurant but only finding a cafe whose manager was extremely rude and crazy, we left this town and continued our journey to the Big Bend Park. We drove for a couple of hours through arid hills until the small village of Marathon, and headed South on the US Route 385. We passed a US Border Patrol checkpoint which was controlling the cars on the other side of the road. A couple of minutes later, we were in the complete wilderness of Texas. Continue reading
Old US Highway 90, Kinney County, Texas
One thousand nine hundred and twenty two miles in four days, I think that is a new record. We didn’t drive for the sake of driving but it was even. We drove all over the place, trying to get as much out of Texas as we could in half a week. We probably achieved this goal, except the fact that one would normally need weeks to properly visit this state. Besides San Antonio, Austin and Houston, we stopped by many other towns such as Del Rio, Fredericksburg, Sanderson, Ozona. The main interest of our trip was however the Big Bend National Park, vast protected area located in the Chihuahuan Desert next to the Mexican border. Continue reading
Market Square, Wroclaw.
I feel like writing tonight, and I feel like writing about my first experience in Eastern Europe. It was only a 3 days stay in the great city of Wroclaw, Poland, but I’ve learned a lot from it. I discovered I had more prejudices than I thought, and that they were completely wrong. It is a good lesson for the rest of my life.
I’ve been in Louisiana for almost two months now, and it still seems pretty crazy to be here. But I won’t complain, because Louisiana is a great great place, as great as when I used to live in Italy I think. Its culture, its food, its nature, all of this makes it a very special destination that surprises me everyday. Continue reading
The hike was almost as good as the crazy sauna party we had the previous day in our hotel. It was very strange because last summer, I had already more or less done the route we were now doing. The landscape, so green in early September, was now barely recognizable. The slopes of the mountains were all white and grey. It accentuated the feeling of loneliness and remoteness from civilization. Continue reading
Despite the exhausting 11 hour mountaineering session we had on Saturday on the A’ Ghlas-bheinn mountain, some of us were eager to try something harder on Sunday. Nothing could have been better than the famous 5 mile long ridge of the Five Sisters of Kintail.
Once upon a time, a friend called and told me we should do something for Spring Break. I was under high pressure with the thesis I had to write for graduation. A few days away wouldn’t be of any harm. So, we organized a four day trip to the Pyrenees, in an area right next to the border to Spain. We were five people : two Czech friends, one Moroccan, one German and I. Continue reading
Backcountry Tranquility 