Jamie Chong

I’m back at McDonald’s using their free wifi. We are currently in Gap, the town closest to Ceuse. I’ve put in two days of route climbing already, but I haven’t been on anything harder than 12c. My endurance is horrible. The hike up to the crag is thankfully not nearly as bad as I had imagined.

We arrived here two days ago after a short drive from l’Argentiere where the TAB competition was held. The comp was very well organized and a lot of fun. Qualifiers ran over two days; a three hour session per day. There were 47 problems and every problem counted towards the final score. There were V14 climbers doing V0s to get the points. Sarah placed 34th out of 54 open females and I came 29th from 111 open males. Sean made finals and clinched 2nd place after flashing the 4th boulder. The prize money for second place was €1000!! When are competitions in Canada going to get to this level?

The next day we drove towards Gap. On the way we stopped at a nice lake off the side of the highway. We spent about three hours swimming, tanning and lazing. When we got back to the car we discovered the most horrible thing: the car was broken into. The window wasn’t smashed but the passenger door was pryed open in order to unlock it. I’m usually pretty paranoid about leaving my bag unattended, but for some reason I left it in the car. In it was my Macbook, headphones and $700 wide angle lens, which had already been stolen once before. Sarah’s day pack with all her climbing gear was gone. Sean lost his bag of climbing gear and Mathilde’s laptop was also taken. Luckily Sean’s prize money was still in the car; the thieves didn’t search through anything, they just took what was easily accessible. In terms of value I think I was hit the hardest. I’ve definitely been feeling a bit down over the last few days. Hopefully that will subside over time. At least I didn’t lose any photos because I hadn’t even had the chance to upload them from my camera yet.

We are planning two more climbing days in Ceuse then we will drive to Barcelona with a brief stop in Valence along the way. Sean will be competing at a world cup there. Sarah and I will act as coach and physio so we can get greater than spectator access. We’ll probably spend 4 days in Barcelona then we’ll go to Rodellar to climb in the sun for a few days.

There is still a lot of time left in our trip, we won’t be back until September. However there are some exciting things awaiting us when we get home. Before I left I sold my Condo. This means that Sarah and I will be home-shopping as soon as we get back. We’re looking for a place on the North Shore. By then there should also be prime conditions in Squamish!

Unfortunately I don’t have a way to upload photos to this blog post. Until I figure out a way to do so, my words will have to suffice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 4:17 am and is filed under Climbing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.