Monday 24 January 2011

Lets fire this bad boy up again...

Well I had just about forgotten I had a blog. Hardly surprising as my one and only post was slightly on the mundane side. I have decided to try and write a few entries on here about what I'm up to (especially while I'm away) in case anyone cares.

A quick re-cap of what I've been doing: Last year I bought a beautiful blue camper van with my girlfriend Rosie. We set off in said van with a view to travel round Europe climbing as many bits of rock as we could. Firstly, we visited Fontainebleau. We got there half way through September and it was still really hot, but we managed a few good problems at lower grades. Stand out problems for me were L'Etrave 7b+ at J.A. Martin and Arabesque 7b+ at Cul de Chien. Then the weather cooled down and we were able to pull hard on stuff, though I did not really manage to get much done. Noir Desire and Ecaille de Lune, both 7c were all I could manage. Tried lots of other hard things and have many projects to get back to. As usual the same excuses come out; weather too hot, weather too wet, slicing finger open cutting sausage, crashing the van into a deer... etc etc

We then went to Ticino where we were even less prolific. I really only did Dr Med Dent 7b+ and Komilator 8a. Both outstanding problems but a bit pathetic really. Must try harder. The only other thing I came close to was the Alphane Moon ~7c?, which I should have done in a session but had to leave early on the day and never went back!

Switzerland and the van didn't get on and the weather was pretty dump (always the same story). We ran away to Nice / Monaco for a bit of warmer sport just before deciding to drive home for xmas and to get the van fixed and to do some setting work to pay for said van fixings and the like.

While I've been home I've managed a few 7c/+'s: Transformer lh, Yorkshireman ss and Hitchhikers ss at Bowden / Kyloe in

We hope to be off again by the end of this week. I plan to be a little less fussy about what I do when, as I think it may have led to the lack of quantity of hard climbs getting done. Don't get me wrong, the above aren't lacking in quality, I'd just like to do more of them.