This year, I went to Pyrenees, which is a mountain range on the border between France and Spain. I didn’t go there alone, with me there was a great friend of mine and a small group of 13 people. In Germany, we call it “Jugendreise”, I don’t know, if there is something similar in the US, but it’s pretty much just a group vacation with a bunch of teenagers, which you learn to appreciate over the course of the travel.
This was probably my last trip of this kind, because I am now 18 and these things are only meant for people younger than that. I could go and oversee a vacation like that in the future, but I am not sure, if I am the right kind of person for that to be honest.
So what did we actually do?
As you might be able to imagine, we mostly hiked from mountain to mountain, occasionally setting up our “tarps” to cook, eat and sleep inside of. Tarps are like tents, but they are missing two of the sides, so it’s much less to transport. When we came across a town, we bought enough of the ingredients we would need until we had the next opportunity to shop.
This mostly went well, but I was really tired of the same old semolina pudding without any spices or extras, like fresh fruits or chocolate cream (because we ran out of all of these things) :(. All around, the food was pretty nice though, and a lot of people really invested a lot of work into preparing nice food for us.
Why it was awesome
The real reason, why it was so good though, was because of the great group. At the group travels, I did before this, I never experienced such a motivated group, where everybody supported one another and we mostly got along really well. I have met so many amazing people there and some of the conversations I had were so refreshing and fun.
I never expected this, but there were actually two people there, which could talk to me about Linux and computers. Like, this one person, I never expected to be a Linux nerd, because he was so far beyond any stereotypes, I had in my head about “Linux-People”, but he turned out to be a really kind soul, who I could have nerd talks with. The other person, in addition to being a tech nerd, also was a leftist, and he had done a lot more than me in this area and some of the insights he gave me were honestly kind of incredible. One of the phrases from him, which I really liked, was: “Es gibt keine Macht ohne machen” (=There is no power without doing).
The weather in the Pyrenees was (at least while we were there) uniquely terrible. On about half of the days, we were there, we had pretty severe rain and storms, often both at the same time. The wind often damaged the rubber bands, that held our tarp to the ground and we had to go out into the rainstorm and fix them vor hold them for a longer period of time, to not stress them too much. The crazy thing was, that instead of this creating arguments or worsening our mood (because this was pretty stressfull sometimes) this actually strengthend our relationship, because we all helped each other in the best way we could.
“It doesn’t matter, where you are, as long as long as you are with the right people” – Source: I made it the fuck up
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