The evening panned out like this: we finished climbing at Rocher Cannon aroun 1900, cooked dinner, m0ved the car to the farthest corner of the carpark and set up hammocks just off the carpark in the trees. We were in bed by 2200 and asleep shortly after. James fell out of his car-crash of a hammock almost immediately and slept on the floor instead. Some time between 2300 and 0000 we were woken up by the sounds of a helicopter circling slowly overhead, getting lower and lower. It kept slowly circling for about five mins and the downdraft from the rotors was knocking the hammocks around. It then seemed to fly away for a min, then return even lower and then land in the carpark next to the car, maybe 30m away from our bivvy!
The noise and the wind and the lights was quite terrifying in the middle of this forest at the dead of night. Chris and I had swung out of our hammocks onto the floor and put shoes on, expecting armed police to arrest us any minute for wild camping (which is illegal in Fontainbleau). The helicopter spent maybe five mins on the ground which the searchlight moving around before it just took off and left! It took me ages to get to sleep after that, every light or sound was a perimeter being set up around us! Best guess is they were looking for someone, checked out our car and decided it wasn't the one they were looking for. I'm sure they'd have seen us bivvying on an IR camera and decided not to bother us. Seriously weird!
Friday morning we were up, fed and packed pretty quickly and got in a few hours bouldering before setting off for Calais. I think were were all suffering for the previous days climbing with aching arms and sore tips so we were on the road slightly earlier than we needed to be and we got an earlier ferry back.
We drove up to my house in Rushden for the evening, had chip shops chips for dinner, a few celebrationary beers and enjoyed our first hot showers for weeks. We've not been able to wash for nearly a week so we all felt super clean afterwards! Sleeping on a mattress felt heavenly.
Final totting up of the ledger shows we spent about £180 per person all in for two weeks. Pretty incredible. Bo)
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