Arrived: Saint Chely-d'Aubrac 6:30pm
Total hours: 11
Total kms: 35.8
Accumulated kms: 130.3
Weather: Really windy all day, and sunny enough to give me a slight sunburn despite my hat.
I wanted to get an early start this morning, but I didn't mean to leave this early. I thought it was 5:40am when I got up to do yoga, but it was actually 4:40am. When I left it was dark outside, and I had to use a torch to find the signs for the first half hour.
My morning was great as I finally got hold of Angie on the phone. It's amazing how something so small as a conversation can put such a spring in your step. I was beaming for hours and felt much lighter as I walked.
I came across two more pilgrims on the road today as I walked - Pierre, from Switzerland, and a French girl whose name I can neither pronounce nor remember, who looked almost exactly like my friend Bryony King. Weird. She spoke English well and Pierre spoke enough, and I walked with them for just under an hour then stopped at a restaurant for lunch where I completely blew my budget out of the water. But it felt hard to say no. Besides, my body was craving some cooked vegetables and that's what I got for lunch. I also got an amazing local dish, specific to the region, that was kind of like mashed potato, cheese and something like cayenne pepper all cooked up into a pasty dough. It was so delicious!
The rest of the afternoon was spent walking uphill. Lots and lots of up. It was all out in fields too, and actually grew a bit - not boring, but numbing. After I reached Auberac, my guide said I had 7.3km to get here. Pierre's book said 8km. It ended up taking three hours, and this was for a section that was mainly downhill. The walk to Auberac was either eight or nine kilometres depending on which book you agree with, and all uphill, and that took me a little over an hour and a half. Something's not adding up there!
I'm getting increasingly nervous about finding accommodation. Bryony (as I shall call her) said I was crazy to not be booking in advance. She said that even if the guide book says that places should be open, they're probably not this time of year. Point proven tonight when the place I wanted to stay in was closed. I was lucky, but come the end of the month it's going to be a lot harder to find accommodation that's not a pricey hotel. Bryony also thought I'd be lucky to get over the Pyrenees, she reckons it'll be snowing too much. Then again, Pierre thought otherwise. Oh, and even thought the priest in Le Puy said I should take a different, more northerly route to see an amazing town, Bryony warned me against it and said I'd probably find virtually nothing open. She was such a barrel of laughs, ol' Bryony.
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