GR11 - Day 34 - to Refugi de Engorgs

Got off to an early start. We walked through green meadow after green meadow. We reached the Cabana dels Esparvers in decent time. Then the fun began... We had a stream crossing where the two large stones I had to step on were a bit far apart. Peter always gives me a hand in those cases. So here I am with a foot on one stone, holding Peter's hand. Don't I slip off the rock into the creek, mid-calf, and to make matters worse, I lose my balance and fall backwards into the creek, dragging Peter with me. Peter came out relatively unscathed. His walking pole floated down the creek a way, but we were able to fetch it. I was completely soaked. I emptied my boots of water, wrung out my socks and kept on going. I was frozen stiff. All wet at 4 degrees Celsius isn't the best. When we reached the pass, the sun was shining so we took a break and I took the stuff out of my pack to see what the damage was. My sleeping bag was a bit wet as was my Therma-rest and my fleece leggings. Not bad. I dried out a bit and we kept going down some pretty steep gravelly slippery trail down to the bottom of the valley. We were supposed to encounter the Refugi de Engorgs about 1 hr after the pass, but it never seemed to appear. We walked and walked, following the red/white marks all the way until we came to a stream crossing. Be damned if it wasn't the same creek where I fell in in the morning. Somewhere, somehow, we did a U-turn and came back on our steps!! Over 5 hrs of walking and climbing for nothing. Oh boy! Now we have to climb 600 m to the pass all over again, go down the steep slippery path all over again. This time Peter had strict orders to look at the bloody GPS. He ever only looks at it when he checks the altitude. Not only that, he had noticed that we were going backwards. He ignored it and thought he had made an error entering the data. We did finally make it to the Refugi de Engorgs after 9h30. Our destination had been the Refugi de Malniu, but we couldn't fathom another 2h30 so we stayed put. The Refugi is filthy but at least it has nice thick mattresses. We were the only occupants contrary to yesterday where the place was crawling with people.