Preparation - Food

Walking through France means access to very good food.  Walking in France also means that you have to plan for Sunday afternoon through Tuesday morning as few grocery stores and boulangeries are open.  Also, grocery stores often close between noon and 16h00.

Breakfast
Our preference was to get coffee at a bar, croissants at the boulangerie and yogurt at the grocery store and eat on the way.  When there was nowhere in town (or there was no town!) to get breakfast items, we ate at the hotel or gîte where we had stayed.  Breakfast in France is usually continental with a hot beverage (coffee, tea or hot chocolate), baguette with butter and jam and croissants.  Sometimes there is yogurt or cheese.

Lunch
With only a few exceptions (and when it was Monday), we purchased lunch from the grocery store and the boulangerie in the morning (bread, cheese, fruit, cookies, chocolate, etc).  As you have to carry everything with you - including the garbage - we stayed away from jars of food and anything heavy.

I hope you like cheese and bread!

Dinner
Our first choice was always dinner out (in October, outdoor picnics are not a viable option...); an opportunity to celebrate the day's walk. If the accommodation was in the middle of nowhere, we would have to go for the demi-pension. Occasionally, tired of restaurants, we had picnics inside our room (that works for hotel rooms, not really for the sparse rooms in gîtes.

Pigging out, literally.

Backup food.
We always had some backup food that would fill us up if we just couldn't get to food for a meal. Nuts, raisins, and cookies or chocolate. We did get tired of the nuts and raisins, and they are heavy.

Ziplocs
Ziploc containers are great for leftover cheese or meats, and, when we had an apartment twice, leftover pasta.

I prepared this Food planning document to help us in making choices as we went along, but even some of the places I was assured by the tourist office would be open (the grocery store in St. Chely d'Aubrac, for example) were not. In those cases, we loaded up on breakfast (buffet, if possible), and snacked on leftover nut/raisin mix and cookies and leftover cheese we had planned for when we were made aware of the closure.