I am back

It has been awhile since I last posted, in fact about a month. Here's what has happened since then: I got some more hiking and camping gear in Marseille for my walk across the Pyrenees, then took the train up Hendayes where the hiking path starts. I walked for about three weeks, saw many beautiful places, but in the end got tendonitis and have had to stop walking. Right now I am in a small town called Revel, hanging out at the house of some friends I met on a more successful walk across France two years. Really great people, they really invited me right off the street to get to know their family and sleep in their house just as it was about to start raining.
Some random thoughts and impressions from my Pyrenees walk:
-I walked on a well-known hiking route known as the GR10, which goes all the way from the Atlantic ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, staying on the French side of the Pyrenees. The path is quite hard, mainly because it stays so close to towns so that you can buy food. The thing is, towns are located in valleys, whereas the most interesting hiking is in the mountains. That means a fairly predictable rhythym of a long climb in the morning, followed by a long descent in the evening.
-In the higher parts of the path, at around 2000m, the water is so clean it is almost sweet.
-Living in a big city with an air pollution problem made me forget what it is like to have a sense of smell.
-Coming from crazy Moscow to tranquil France is actually a bit boring. What I understand by the word adventure has changed a lot in the last two years, and I was kind of hoping before coming back to France for a second long walk that I would repeat the same amazing experience of the first time. Beautiful sights? Yes. Nice people? Yes. Spontaneous meetings with unexpected people? Yes, but rarely on the hiking path itself. There are just plain way too many people on the GR10 for you to be seen as anything more than a tourist by the inhabitants of the places you pass by.
-As soon as I left the hiking path, people became more welcoming towards me: I have been invited four times to people houses, whereas that doesn't happen on the beaten path.
-I jumped into a nearly ice cold spring high in the mountains. I suggest you do the same if you get a chance. It is so cold it hurts, but then for the rest of the day you feel just great.
That's all for now.
Tim