11 nov

May I give some advise. If you drive a campervan, or in fact any large car, definitely when it is more than 30 years old, do NOT take the D17 to go from Axat to Prades. Avoid the Col de Jau (1513 metres), admire it from a distance. The road to its top is not fit for vehicles larger than anything on two wheels. And for biking over it I assume you need the condition of someone who can compete in the Tour de France. Not even a truckload full of EPO will make this mountain bearable.
Problem one: It is steep. So steep they do not even want to warn you about percentages. Too steep for our third gear, and the engine had to work hard on the second gear. Did I ever mention 50 km/hour was the minimum speed. I was wrong. It can go down much farther. But we stayed above zero, he says happily.
Problem two: The overhanging cliffs. It probably was a good idea to blow away a little bit of cliff, just the make enough space for the road. But it beats me why the French Catalans thought they had to leave half the mountain hanging over your head, without something to support the cliff at the other side of the road. It seems like asking for trouble, and you don’t want trouble on a mountain road.
Problem three: It is narrow. On the narrow part of about 30 kilometres we only met 3 cars, luckily, but one was another campervan. They were on the mountainside, we were staring into a ravine, which might explain why he was happy to try to pass us. It worked somehow. Julie would not be able to explain why. She had her hands in front of her eyes.
Which was where they were most of the trip. And that while I drove more responsible than ever. Really, this was not the hill to let the Michael Schumacher in me out. Of which I am the only one to believe he’s there in the first place, by the way. Slowly gently up the hill and slowly gently down.
Problem four: Falling stones. They warn for them all the time. Julie asked me why they even bothered warning. We would be dead if one struck us. She is not fatalistic, at least not normally, but she has a theory that were heads are balls will hit them. In this case the balls were pieces of rock and they were just waiting to hit our heads.
I told Julie the chance that a falling rock would hit our car was negligible. I mean it would have to hit the road in the second – ok, we were going slow, five seconds! – that it took us to pass. There is a possibility this would happen but it is impossible to put into percentages. Anything dislikeable that can not be put into whole percentages is nothing to worry about, is my rule. In fact I do not worry before a possibility hits 50%, and after that I prefer hope.
Anyway. Julie is not solid in her percentages and my reassurance didn’t help one bit. I have to say that I got a little worried by the amount of broken down pieces of rock I saw. I then figured that we are basically driving with a double roof, having the roof of the van and the little attic floor where people could sleep but that we use as a space for duvets and coats. I didn’t share these thoughts with Julie. Was pretty sure they would not comfort her.
But then we arrived in Prades, or Prada as the Catalans like to call it. Found out it is the town that Pablo (Pau) Casals fled to when he didn’t want to live anymore in Franco Spain. He played daily in the Romanesq church. I read a book about Casals a few years ago, about him playing the Cello Suites from Bach. It is the most comforting music I can think of. I will play it tonight. It is just the kind of music one needs after driving the D17 from Axat to Prades.