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| Susan and René in the morning light. |
Breakfast of toast, coffee, butter and homemade jam. We ate with Tilman again, and the owner's mother Françoise was there again to prepare coffee and send us off. I was sore but excited to be walking to Conques today.
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| View from the small grocery store in Golinihac. |
The walk was much easier today. It was sunny all day but cold and windy. We followed the 20 remaining crosses all the way to Golinhac where we bought apples and baguette at a tiny grocery. We were walking by green pastures with cows, along roads and gravel paths.
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| Perfect day for a picnic. |
After a quick stop to visit Espeyrac, we stopped for lunch in Sénergues, where we had a lunch of cheese from yesterday, plus the apple and baguette. And cookies. We ate in a little pilgrim park in a town. The park was perfectly set up for pilgrims, with a number of picnic tables, garbage cans, and a WC on the other side of the church. I imagined that it would have been packed during the high season.
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| 200 km done, 300 km left to do! |
During the afternoon we came across a handmade marker on the side of the road. It was written in chestnuts. We knew that Tilman had left it for us to mark the 200 km point, as he had promised yesterday. It lifted my spirits.
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| It did not rain. |
The afternoon was a little cloudy and we were worried about the rain. We saw no other pilgrims all day although we knew there were some ahead of us.
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| The toughest type of trail: rocky and uphill! |
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| Conques conquered! |
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| We walked to Conques! |
We walked down into Conques, which was quite a steep descent. Conques is beautiful, dominated by a cathedral in the center of town. We met some of the other hikers and pilgrims who we had met previously. We also saw Tilman and thanked him for making the 200 km sign.
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| Hiking shoes. |
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| The view from our room. |
We checked into the
L'hotellerie de l'abbaye and got our very spartan room. We had to leave our hiking shoes in the foyer, and place our backpacks into a large plastic bags which had been sprayed with citronella. René and I were the least likely to bring bedbugs into the hostel, as we had never stayed in a communal gîte.
We did a quick tour around town. There were a number of tourists, clean and spiffy in their city clothes and shoes. It was the first time since Le Puy that we had seen so many non-hikers in one place. We got a hot chocolate at a café. Sitting in the warmth of the café we talked about how much farther I would be able to walk and if we needed to make plans to skip a section and take a train or a bus to farther along the route. René checked train schedules and we noted the information and decided to see how I was doing in the morning. We ran back to the room for a quick shower, then off to vespers at the cathedral.
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| La cuvée des pélerins! |
We sat with Tilman and Sophia for supper and we had some good laughs. We had mixed frozen vegetable mayo salad as starter, partially burned lasagna, the a great cheese course, then coconut tart. And red wine! The food is made and served by volunteers. They were pleasant and helpful. The food was not great, but the company was perfect. Luckily we were sitting at a table set for eight, but since we were four, we got left-overs. I think the hikers at the other full tables must have left hungry.
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| Profile from Espeyrac only... |
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