Today we walked 23.7 km or 14.7 miles
The GPS says we went up 245 m and down 365m (however, the weather conditions will have affected the altimeter as it works on barometric pressure.)
When our room mates said goodnight to us at about 8 pm last night, our hearts sunk, was this going to be another of those 6:30 wake ups, or was it going to be even earlier?
I didn't have a fantastic nights sleep as I was worried about snoring so kept on waking up to make sure I wasn't! After 1 am I gave up worrying and decided to get some real sleep, regardless of the consequences. I woke up at 6 and looked at my watch, and thought I would get another half hour before the others started to get up, at 7:10 when Lesley's alarm went off and they still didn't stir I wondered are they both alive? All was revealed when they were about to go and told us they had finished their walk for this year.
Looking out of the window we saw that it had rained in the night, but now the sun was shinning brightly, just as we were about to leave the heavens opened and the rain came down in buckets. So as we only had a relatively short distance to go we decided to wait until the deluge had abated. We set out dressed in our rain gear but after we had stopped at the bakery, the sun had come out and we packed our rain gear away.
The walking was very similar to yesterday as we are still walking across the Causse, a couple of times in the morning the rain started, we got out our rain gear, and within five minutes we were sweltering and had to take them off again.
We stopped for lunch in the village of Bach but after we had finished we had to dive into the Church to avoid a three minute shower and lots of rolls of thunder. For the rest of the afternoon, we kept just in front of the storm, only donning our rain gear for the last hour.
On the way we bumped into three of the Canadians one had very painful feet and so was taking in slowly. By the time we got to Poudally the heavens had opened and the storm was raging about us with lightening as well as thunder, autumn has now come to this corner of France with a bang!
After a shower and change of clothes we felt a lot better, Poudally is an old farm that has been renovated by it hardworking young owners, who in the rooms have successfully mixed the old with the new.
We went outside to check our phone for texts to discover my iPod had safely arrived in England and had been revived from the dead, but with the loss of all my data, as it had suffered a major crash, Nick our family techno wiz, is going to reload what he can and then post it back. We therefore had to work out where we would be in a weeks time, to give it time to get here. Hopefully we will be reunited with the iPod in Condom in a weeks time.
Our hosts cooked us a lovely three course meal of soup, duck and pudding, and we and our fellow guests sat around talking over coffee (well they all talked in quick fire French and we tried to pick up as much as we could). The conversation ended with a long discussion about bed bugs, their detection and elimination, they are a particular problem on this route because of the number of pilgrims and walkers. We had already heard of one place that had been closed for 24 hours while a cleaning squad went in. Our host blamed the gites communal, as they weren't in her opinion as thorough in their cleaning as someone like her. I'm sure it psychosomatic but since the conversation I have been itching.
On the Camino in France
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