Albany

 With a sore leg and unsure how badly I’d hurt it I decided to take a few days off hiking. Quentin and I stayed in a few free campsite outside of Albany, but due to endless rain we didn’t actually end up spending much time together. During the days I headed to the library and the rec center and swam a bit to stretch my sore muscles and get a nice shower. Albany is a really cute town I plan to return to if I have time. It’s big enough to have a good variety of quality restaurants, but still quite small. It’s an old whaling town and has a lot of interesting history. The public facilities are really nice too. 

The library is relatively new with big windows and lots of space and seems like a great community gathering location. I spent a lot of time in there between my smarting knee and tue endless rainstorms. One day Quentin joined me in the library for a few hours and later we ended up having a funny conversation about libraries and the differences between here and France and the US. I find here and the US libraries are quite similar. They have books and computers, but they primarily serve as a free public space where community events occur. Conference rooms have small events, kids and teens gather after school, parents bring their small children to look at books and play. Sure people work and study there, but those are just some of the functions of the library. To me, a library isn’t necessarily the quietest of places, there are quiet parts, but it’s not silent by any means. Quentin told me in France it’s quite different. He was shocked and a bit annoyed that there were children there who weren’t studying. He was like ‘the point of the library is to study it work, it needs to be really quiet’ and I found that really interesting, I find that true with a university library, but not a public one. I asked if they have other community centers where people can gather and do these activities or free places that kids can go afterschool and he said he wasn’t really sure, he’d never thought about it. I found the whole thing rather fascinating. 

While staying in Albany I stayed in 3 different campsites. 2 free ones east of Albany and one national park west of Albany. The national park site was for sure the most beautiful, it was situated right on the beach and as I sat and watched the ocean whales passed closely by. It was fabulous. The unfortunate part was the wind though. All night it whipped across my tent making a racket and the rain poured down. I didn’t have the most pleasant sleep that night. The next morning I got up and worked in my car a bit hoping the rain might stop later long enough for me to take down my tent. After an hour or so the rain did abate and I went to go grab by gear and pack up… to my utter dismay my tent had entirely collapsed in the wind. The waterproofing of the tent then worked wonderfully to hold and inch of water inside the tent… soaking my blankets and sleeping pad completely. I carried heavy, drenched items to my car and tried to lay them out in the sun between the intermittent rain. Eventually I gave up and packed my soaking stuff into my tent and got a hotel in the city to dry out my clothes. I put my stuff in the room and cranked the heat as high as it would go and it did work to dry everything out by the next day thankfully. A few days of less than perfect luck and lots of rain made it time to move on to the next town.