Day 12 - Une journée au bord du lac

A day by the lake - Lac de Génos, Loudenvielle.
At just over 3000 feet the lake just outside Loudenvielle is a populare destination for not only tourists but locals from all the surrounding regions. Our journey took us back along some of the roads we had recently travelled, this time hugging the rock walls thru the gorges under the protective canopy's of steel netting to protect us from falling rocks, dislodged by the recent rain.
It wasn't long till we were down from the mountain's, running along the edge of the Pyrenees only to turn back up into them again for the next valley. That's the way it goes with landscape like this .
With the snow capped peaks that overshadow our destination in sight, we started to wind our way up, thru little villages, once again. Unfortunately our timing wasn't great. We hit  lots of road works digging up the already narrow roads to lay heavy electrical cables for various hydroelectric installations, sometimes sectioning off long stretches with traffic lights adding more time to the journey. Sat at traffic lights does give you a chance to have a look around; I've never see a trailer with a towing hitch on it before 🫣
Eventually we arrived at our CampingCarPark stop for the night, another level park up with electricity, water and dumping for less than £10/24hr 😉
Time for a walk round the lake in the sunshine before tea. The area has walking routes, mountain bike trails, ski slopes, chair lifts, paddle boats, a skate board park, picnic areas, GoApe tree activities and even a mini water park but that was shut. 
The level in the lake is kept fairly constant by a series of locks and gates at the far end; they may also be in place to keep the fish level up as the lake is stocked from a nearby fish farm with trout and salmon and is therefore a regular spot for both local and visiting fishermen. We watch one guy, gentle work a fairly large fish, couldn't tell what it was, for over 10mins till he had it close enough for his mate to get it in the keep net.
I even saw J.R.Hartley doing a spot of fly fishing, another book on the way?😉
After all the excitement of the fishing we took time out for an ice lolly watching the paragliders then continued around the lake .
As we walked along the path, past children playing, fishermen fishing and paragliders trying to not land in the lake, along came the old farmer taking his goats out for an early evening munch of daisy's, buttercups and clover...

(embedded video of the goats, if you cant see it try another time as its taking a long time to process. If you turn up the sound you can hear the farmer snarling at the goats 😅)


It was all very pleasant. The path eventually took us back into town so we called in the local minimarket for some supplies and a bar of dark chocolate mysteriously made its way into the bag; lemon, lime and ginger.

 My turn to cook; meaty sausage stir fry, cooked the Keith Floyd way, wine in the pan and wine in me 😉. Slept well .... even with the fireworks going off at 10pm further up the valley and the weather warnings of avalanches 😱





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