I nearly lost a finger and we definitely lost some quickdraws (October 2023)

We went to another climbing area. There were not so many routes and the rock was often not very stable so I won’t share a link or something.

We found a super nice camp spot and had a funny sheep with one black ear visiting us with her friends.

At the end of our first day there, we left some of our quickdraws on one of the routes and the next day two of them were gone. I was so pissed. We asked the construction workers who were working close to the route but they did not know anything. Still I was pissed. I mean these quickdraws were more than four meters in the route so you have to really put in some effort to get them.

In that area we did a crazy difficult route. The beginning was so hard. It took us more than an hour to get up the first three meters. When I was close to the anchor (top) of that route I was pretty tired and it got very difficult for me.

At one point I had a pretty good position and wanted to clip in my rope into the next quickdraw. I stretched myself up to reach the quickdraw with my rope because I was craving for some rest after clipping. Doing so was of course not the best idea because pre-clipping like that adds a long distance to the distance I would fall. At first my position felt stable enough but with more stretching it felt less stable and when I needed just half centimeter more, I lifted my right foot just a bit more and suddenly lost all the friction and started falling.

I was not shocked about it but after a split second of falling I realized that the rope started wrapping around my right pointing finger. I felt the heat of the friction of the rope running around my finger and intuitively I tried to shake it off my finger. It just worked before the rope started to tense up and I was super happy. And I was still falling and falling and started to see the quickdraws racing by in front of me. It felt like watching railway sleepers passing by when watching down on the rail between two train cars. And from somewhere the sound of these racing pods from Star Wars Episode One came into my head. After about four meters the rope started to break my Fall, tensed up and I was sitting in the rope. All good. Happy. A bit of blood on my finger.

Fixing Rosinante in the darkest car garage (October 2023)

It was pretty wet and got colder in Georgia and we started to use Rosinante’s diesel heater.

In Sveri I noticed that the connection of the cable connecting the starter battery in Rosinante’s engine bay with the charging booster in the cabin was broken. Without fixing it we were not able to charge the batteries in the cabin while driving. And our solar panel was not strong enough to compensate our electricity needs.

So we went to the next bigger town Kutaisi and searched for a car garage that was willing to lift the cabin from our pickup.

At one point I really got annoyed! We asked two garages with a four-point-car-lift to lift our cabin from the pickup but they refused because they never did something like that. That felt absolutely German to me and I got pissed.

After continuing our search we drove into an old hangar. It was absolutely dark in there. We needed Rosinante’s headlights to drive into it and searching for a mechanic. We found a very nice and helpful guy who lifted the cabin and never got tired of assisting us.

In the photos the place seems to be not very dark but it was. It felt like working underground and we were thinking how it must be to work in that dark all day.