World Playground Deceit.net

Small Pyrenees trip

Published on
Tags: personal, travel

An actual blog post about something I did to fill some of my 3 weeks of vacations. Never traveled since I started living alone and wasn't particularly into the idea of doing so alone, but for science I decided to experiment with a small 3 days (not counting traveling days) trip near Font-Romeu.

Verdict: it was pretty good and gave me ~5 days of respite from my routine but validated my expectations of "discomfort" about being a lonely, depressed fuck encountering the occasional happy couple/family.

The trip §

I chose this destination because it was only a few hours away by car (no issue on that front, uncrowded motorways), the Pyrenees would be pretty peaceful after the skiing season and there were three activities I looked forward to:

  • Hiking. Did one every day, using my usual "stopwatch in hand" pace. They were a bit too easy for my taste (I need something actually demanding to stop brooding) and some were poorly marked (really hate this). The last one, from the Coll del Pam to the Bouillouses lake, was probably the best, very well marked even if still too easy. Was so picturesque I almost expected the infamous Peer Gynt air to start out of nowhere!
  • Driving. Wasn't disappointed, my little Miata was basically at home on those mountain roads and small village streets: roaring in 2nd inside tight hairpins, overtaking some bumbling SUVs and generally giving as much fun as conceivable. It helped that the weather was basically al dente during my entire stay, never had to raise the hood even with nothing more than a polo shirt on my back.
  • Hot spring baths. The perfect treat for tired legs after a hike… had two on my docket:
    • Dorres' open air roman baths: wasn't up to snuff, water felt lukewarm, not "41 °C", some paused construction work leaving the place in a dire state and the rickety infrastructure (e.g. broken showers) didn't deserve my 6€.
    • Llo's baths: better but still not hot enough for my taste (they advertise 34~35 °C, though) and slightly crowded with fat tourists. First time trying a sauna, though! Managed 15 minutes at 85 °C, heh.

The region was even deader than expected. I was the only person alive in my apartment hotel during the first day (not even a receptionist), felt like I was in The Shining; got a few groups staying the night after that. Would have treated myself to a restaurant or two, but almost everything was closed… the advantage is that I kept the "lean and mean" body I arrived with.

A few photos §

Didn't bring my RX100, so I made do with my Sony XA2 and the nifty Open Camera app. Properly downscaled and encoded via MozJPEG@Q98:

Roc de la Calma
View from the Roc de la Calma
Roc de la Calma
Center of the Pradeilles lake (front)
Roc de la Calma
Center of the Pradeilles lake (back)

Addendum: unexpected comeback "presents" §

By "present", I mean something amusing like colorectal cancer. Two of them, in fact.

First the recent MangaDex DMCA nuking that may mean another exodus in the near future; and I can only hope the replacement will have the same automation potential via an easy JSON API…

Then one of my NAS' two Toshiba MG05s shat itself to death (dmesg full of critical medium error; basically UREs). I was a cheap ass at that time, simply put them in a JBOD configuration using LVM, so bad luck gave my backside the required kick to finally upgrade. Here's the timeline of fun:

  1. Look at SMART logs and see only a few failed READ commands.
  2. Try to reboot a few times (a clean poweroff/boot cycle did the trick) until the drive is made available by the kernel.
  3. xfs_repair -L the logical volume until it can be mounted again.
  4. Stop everything and poweroff the machine.
  5. Spend 1.5k€ on HDDs (5x 10 TB Seagate ST10000NT001; not trusting WD after the SMR Red scandal) in order to make a 4 drive RAID 6 (mdadm+XFS, OpenZFS/btrfs are too unstable for my taste and bcachefs will need a few years to become a serious option).
  6. [You are here] Wait for said drives to arrive.
  7. Do an extended SMART test on each of these and return any bad one.
  8. Try to backup the files using rsync (seems painful to try to ddrescue a LVM PV and the data is already checksummed via BitTorrent anyway).
  9. With 4 good drives, build the new RAID and restore the backup.
  10. Finally setup smartd to send alert e-mails to myself via SMTP.
  11. Profit.