Ça Marche

It has been a quiet week on the farm. I'm not just talking about this farm. I mean all farms. Which is to say, I don't have much to report on the general goings-on on the farm, other than to say that I have a new-found love of stripping branches and making walls out of them. I will probably devote a whole post to that at some point. Anyway, I've just had two days off and this is what I did.

So in the gite adjoining the farmhouse, we've had a couple of couples of retired French Canadians staying, and they've been walking portions of the Camino de Santiago (or as they call it here Chemin de St. Jacques de Compostelle, or as the English call it St James's Way). This is the 800km (500 mile) walk that I am hoping to do next year. Being the delightful folk that they are, when the neighbours heard this, they invited me for a day of walking. It was an 18km (I think in miles that's about 11) walk from one village to another (via many other villages).

The five of us drove to the starting village (whose name annoyingly escapes me and the internet won't say), and me and the two men, conveniently both called Guy, got out (one of the women sometimes walks but the other doesn't, instead taking the invaluable role of pick up) and then totally walked 18km.

Apparently, this is fairly big distance for someone who's starting out walking (me) but I found it, for the most part, just like an extremely pleasant stroll with two very interesting and fun strolling companions. By the end it was getting a little bit trickier, possibly because the difficulty got higher (hotter, hillier), possibly because I maybe was getting a bit tired of walking. I was also incapable of touching my toes afterwards, weirdly. Or even my knees. Hips was even a bit of a challenge.

The route was very beautiful, though I think it gets moreso, especially as you get into the mountains. There were a lot of corn fields, and I think we did a higher-than-average amount of road walking (usually there are a lot more trails through fields and woods, which I only experienced a little). Because it's an old pilgrimage route, it swings by a bunch of little churches in tiny, tiny dwellings (twelve buildings, one is always a church, one is always a mairie - France is way more into its mayors than we are ours), which makes a nice distraction from corn, the Guys told me, which I got the sense they'd seen a lot of and were over.

Anyway, it went really well, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and I am really stoked for next year now! When I got home, Christine (who is a nurse by profession) prescribed a dip in the pool, which did actually help a lot, and the next day I didn't even have any aches.

IN FACT, I decided on the next day to walk to the nearest town (Orthez), which was lovely. On the way there. Orthez is old news, but I did explore it a little more and find some cool things. I did not, however, find the Batcave.