A Nice Day for a Walk

Tuesday, September 29 – Day 22

I got up at 6:30 to try to get on the road early. Breakfast was wonderful. I ate a lot, and there was nutella! I still haven’t gotten my nutella crepe, but a couple of slices of bread with nutella on them were pretty good.

Laurence asked if I was ready to go another 30k today, and I said, “Oh yeah, piece of cake.” She hadn’t heard the expression before, but the Dutchman was grinning and said, “Oh yes, I say this all the time ‘piece of cake.'” And then his wife said, “but he messes it up all the time and says, ‘easy cake.'” “Yes, easy cake!”

As I went into the other room to wash my bowl I could still hear him, “Easy cake!”

So I was a bit later getting out than I had hoped, but I was walking away from town as the church chimed 8. There was a rather nice sunrise, and the temperature was high 40s. It was a very pleasant walk today through towns and rolling farmland. There was also a rather nice wind for most of the day.

The first town I came to was Flamarens. Their church is almost entirely ruins and they’re trying to raise funds to rebuild it. It seems like a long project. They also have an old castle thing that currently belongs to someone.

It was another 4k to Miradoux, which has a very nice church, and a little grocery store where I got some bananas and peaches.

After that it was another 5k to Castet-Arrouy, which was 13.5k from my starting point, and I got there in 3 hours. I was feeling pretty good about my pace so far, but knowing you have 19k still to go is a little sobering. This place has a 5 star public restroom! There was dirt and leaves all over the floor, but the there was a toilet seat, and it was clean, and there was toilet paper, and there was running water with actual soap! Not very many of the public restrooms have soap. There usually isn’t even any soap in the bathrooms at the gites.

I spent most of the day walking by myself. I was thinking today, as I was walking along, that the poles make me feel like one of those stilt rabbits from The Dark Cyrstal.

I got into Lectoure a little after 1 pm. I’d been noticing the past few days that a lot of architecture, especially with the churches, has started to take on a Spanish feel. I realized today that’s probably because I’m getting closer to Spain. Lectoure must have been a pretty big deal in it’s day. The Cathedral is huge, and you can see it from miles away. The city itself looks like it was pretty well fortified.

I sat in front of the Cathedral and ate my lunch. Two croissants, two yogurts, and a peach.

I felt pretty good for heading out for my last 9k. I felt like I must have gone close to 9k, but I still had 4-5k left. Overall today went very well. Better than yesterday, even though it was little longer. It’s definitely not something I want to do consistently. I think I have a 34k day coming up this week, too… But tomorrow is 23k!

Dinner was delicious. These people like cooking with garlic. The starter was a green salad and some paté, then the main was some pesto pasta and duck leg. Delicious!!! Dessert was supposed to be some kind of compote, but it was apple sauce. I thought it was kind of odd, due to the quality of the rest of the meal.

Apparently I did my math wrong, because tomorrow is 26k… Or it could be 19k, if I skip seeing a city. I don’t know. Well, 26k is better than 33k. 26k is still a long day.