Day Six

What a long day this turned out to be. I started walking at 6.40 and finished at 16.00, having walked for over 38 kms. I hadn’t intended to walk so far – that’s a long story, mainly about poor estimation. But even if I had, I would have thought maybe six and a half hours, not over nine houses, as it turned out.

The terrain was dreadrul for walking. It was it all up and down, even more than the previous days – not only did I walk almost a full marathon today, but I also climbed a total of 1905 metres, which is one and a half times the height of Ben Nevis, Britains highest mountain.

That would have been hard, but it would not have slowed me down much. The tracks for almost all of those kilometres was either loose stones or knobbly bigger stones, the sort of surface I really dislike, especially coming downhill, and especially with the state of my eyes.

Picture this wonderful little scene when I was about two kilometres from the end, where Gay had made me some lunch several hours earlier – there was a sign across the track – the GR46, one of France’s major pedestrian highways – accompanied by a fence. The sign said that the route was closed and please refer to something which was so curled up I couldn’t read it. Curling was obviously in vogue, so I did the same with my lip and climbed over the fence and another one a few hundred metres further along. After walking so far today, and over 200 kms in the past 6 days, I was not going to go back to please some bloody-minded farmer.


As usual, I have some nice piccies to post, but they fail to load through Internet Everywhere. I will add them when I can.