After a reasonable nights sleep, we got up and headed for breakfast. We followed in a couple we had sat with for our evening meal, who despite the language barrier, had engaged us in conversation and had organised an alternative meal for me as the dish of the day was fish which I am allergic to. This morning this couple, seeing that we would be eating alone, due to a shortage of place settins, moved their plates over to join us, which was a generous gesture to two foreigners with poor French. We wondered if we would have been as generous, and vowed to follow their example in the future.
Following breakfast we packed up treated the first blisters of the trip (suffered by Lesley) put our boots on and headed out of town. As we left Saugues we came across a couple of large pilgrim sculptures, one of a pilgrim with various other pilgrim motifs such as a scallop shell & the other, a life size sculpture of St James.
On approaching the town yesterday, we had passed other sculptures, including one of a local fabled beast. From afar it looked like a crocodile with elephants legs, however, when we saw it up close on a postcard we discovered that it was in fact a wolf like creature. 
We left the town, still carrying on our upward ascent. For the first couple of miles we were walking on Tarmac, but then the surface changed to chalk tracks.The best way to describe the terrain is Alpine, with lots of small meadows where beef cattle and sheep were grazing, and many stacks of split logs are seasoning for the winter fires. Most of the day we travelled uphill except when we encountered a village or hamlet where inevitably there was a steep decent into it before a climb out again.
In many of the villages we saw métier a ferrer les boeufs, which are devices used to hold oxen so they could be shoed prior to working in the fields.
As we were walking nearly 30km we had decided to take a short cut avoiding a loop to a farm called Domaine de Sauvage. However, the route has changed from that described in our guide book, and so we missed our turn. As we settled down to our lunch, our friends from breakfast turned up most concerned that we were where we were, as they knew we planned to take the shorter route. They tried to explain where we were, but our French let us down and we remained in blissful ignorance until they flagged down the passing turbo boys who spoke some English, and a conversation ensued with much arm waving and consulting of guide books. The result was to say that we were better to continue than to go back and anyway the farm at Sauvage was very beautiful and had in fact been recomended to us by friends Sam & Martin. It was quite tempting to stop and ask for a room but Lesley had already booked our bed at Les Faux, and so we carried on.A mile or so later we came to the rather lovely fountain of St Roch (the patron saint of pilgrims)
and shortly we crossed the border from the department of Haute-Loire into the department of Lozere. We then came to the Chapel of St Roch where an old woman informed us that the chapel was open and that we could get a stamp in our pilgrims pasport. We went into the chapel which was very cool and peaceful, where a small boy, probably the old lady's grandson, was waiting to stamp our passport with the chapel's stamp.We then carried on our way to Les Faux, where we landed lucky as got our own room in the Gite, in a wing by ourselves with in effect our own bathroom when we were expecting to have to share a room with a number of others. We were eating in the hotel which the Gite was attached and had a fantastic four course meal for only 12€ each.
On the Camino in France
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