Chapter 13: Mountain Lunch

Today I was awoken at 9:15, and re-awoken at 9:30 for the country walk picnic that Guilhem and his friends had planned. Alice picked us up at 10 a.m. and then we headed over to Armand's. A big surprise as we got in the car was Alice's 5 moth old Dalmatian puppy Zoe; an energetic and stupid young dog, but adorable and kept sticking her head and shoulders over the seat to be near whoever was in the back seat, i.e. me.
We pick up Armand and he is less than pleased to see the dog, "Oh, putain merde." [Oh, fucking shit.] he says as he approaches and Zoe goes to lick him. He sits in the back with me and he is always flinching or moving away and telling the dog to "degager!" [get away!] or "casse toi!" [fuck off!] to try and make it move away from him.
We drive from his to Marie's and Armand steals Guilhem's front seat, and Guilhem gets in Marie's car, and we drive to Laura's. Here, to piss him off, I steal Armand's front seat, but he gets in Marie's car with Laura and Guilhem gets in the back of Alice's car. Vehicular musical chairs with these people.
From here, we drive out across hill and countryside and small town to reach the walkway to begin our trek and picnic.
After getting lost once in a small town and asking for directions, we finally make it to the area we need to get to and we unpack the cars and get Zoe on a leash. We started on the dirt trail up the hills passing small, icy puddles of muddy water in the shade of the trees and hills. We amused ourselves by jumping on them and breaking the ice, occasionally attempting to walk across them without breaking the ice. We always failed. We soon arrived at the man-made lake/dam and ate by the side of it on the bank, under the bright sun, in the cool, crisp air as the dog roamed and ran free. I inhaled the two sandwiches, mandarin and bottled water I had prepared and just enjoyed the sunlight and the crisp air.
Soon I began skipping rocks on the quiet surface of the water - which was very cold, as we found out, as Guilhem attempted to swim in it, but stopped just after taking off his shoes. Guilhem also began launching rocks in the direction of a small trio of ducks, trying jovially to hit one - from therein evertime ducks came near us, we'd all go, "Guilhem, ducks!". After we all finished eating we started a nice walk around the perimeter of the hills of the lake, passing giant pools of water, covered in thick layers of ice, "It's so odd," said Alice, "15 degrees and puddles of ice."
"Yeah," I replied, "surely a bit gob-smacking for me, anyway." We smiled. We hit a particularily big pool of water with a thick ice covering. Guilhem put his goot heavily on the top and the ice didn't move. He took a full step on it before it began to crack, supporting his full body weight for a moment. He bashed his foot down and cracked off a big piece of ice and admired its thickness, "Fuck." He said, "That must be two inches thick!" He threw it into the middle of the pool, attempting to break the whole lot and the piece just ended up getting stuck in the middle. Zoe just ran through it, ignoring the ice and the cold and breaking apart large chunks of the pool, like so many other puddles, and we moved on. We soon made it to the connection point between where we were, and where we started; connected by the thin concrete strip of the dam wall. So, we decided to make our way across it, freezing lake on the one side, small, icy plaform with a very long drop on the other. We all made it across with no problem - Alice carrying Zoe - and began out trip back down the hills to the car and back home. When we got back home we originally made plans to meet up again another time that night before I left, but it ended up not panning out and I hit that hat at 22h30.

- from The Journal December 23rd 2008