Hiking the GR1 - Stage 2

Distance: 13.0 km.  Elevation low/high/total: 255/602/694 m.
Difficulty: 6.0/10.  Scenic: 6.5/10

A 10.8 km hike, though with entry and exit, was a total of 13 km long
click picture to see picture album, here is the link to the geotrack

Finally, Finally!, everything came together so that Miss K and I could tackle the second leg of the New Caledonia Grande Randonée, otherwise know as the GR1.  She's leaving in 6 weeks or so and we have 6 stages still to do!  The difficulty with arranging this hike is that ideally we would have two vehicles so we could park one at each end and skip the hitchhiking that was necessitated in Stage 1 (when we had two cars but parked in the wrong place).  However, we were not able to find companion hikers so based on my confidence things would work out, off we went in the Frog.

And, you know what, things worked out WAY better, than they had for Stage 1.  We parked at the access road for the southern entry point, hiked 2.2 km in to the official start of Stage 2 and off we went.   The weather was pleasant, not too hot, often breezy, a bit of rain at times and the main 10.8 km section took about 3.5 hours to accomplish.  The main item of note was the intense interaction we had with several extremely large spiders along the way.  I was walking point and twice I felt spider web suddenly across my face and spinning around saw Kincso walking in the same, now stretched, web with a giant resident spider only inches from her face.  I figure I saved her life at least twice, maybe thrice.  There's a bit of spider in the pics and video.  Of course, we placed another geocache (link here) as is our intent for each stage.

Once we hit the main road and started hitchhiking while walking the start of the 8 km return trek to our jeep, it wasn't too long before a kindly family stopped and picked us up.  Next week, we hope to tackle Stage 3 which is one of the longest toughest legs (19.5 km) and tentatively have co-hikers lined up as hitchhiking in that stretch of the GR1 would be nigh impossible.