GR10 Day22

The hotel room was lovely and breakfast was great, but our room had poor mobile phone signal and the hotel wifi was incredibly slow so that delayed posting to the blog for another day… 

We had a good breakfast and walked about 2km from the hotel to join the GR10.  It was extremely humid in the valley and we were soon soaked as we climbed out of the valley.  The path was good and not too steep, partly farm tracks and part footpaths.  We stopped and ate some chocolate cookies before continuing to the col where we watched parapenteurs taking off.  The path down was through bracken and although steep was not too bad underfoot.  At one point we missed a turning and carried on along a path.  We realised our mistake, turned back, and were trying to work out where the GR10 path was when another walker arrived, having gone down the wrong path a lot further than us.  We realised that we could see the path across a large muddy area, and after searching around found a dry route to it through the nettles.  The path then steepened considerably as we made our way down to the village of Loudenvielle.   This looked like another upmarket ski village and even the villages higher up all seemed to have been restored as holiday homes.  We stopped there and bought cakes and drinks at the supermarket.  After a decent rest we started the final hour of walking.  Having descended 600m, we now had to ascend 400m to the village of Germ.  This was up a very steep slope and as  we left the village the temperature and humidity were a lot worse than on our earlier climb.  We stopped for a rest on every fourth hairpin and by the time we reached the top I had consumed almost a litre of Orangina.  We checked in, had showers, and then had another cold drink and ice-cream.