Sometimes the pilgrim life is hard to bear. This, however, is not one of those times. This is me enjoying ice cream with my two newly-adopted granddaughters, Victoria (left) and Patricia (right) from Leipzig.

I am out of Roncevalles very early. The lights come on at 6 AM and there is not breakfast here, so it’s up and out. I have 22 kilomtres to get to Zubiri, from which it is only one more day to Pamplona. It is a little hard to believe.

I have a brief fright just as I get up. I go the window and look out. It is still dark and it looks as if it snowed last night. The ground is covered in white and it is quite cool. It takes a few minutes before I catch on that I am looking at the white stones that cover the inner courtyard. Apparently Natalie’s father makes the same mistake at about the same time. He reports snow, she is sceptical.

The camino here to start is wide, level and paved. Then it runs through a forest and although the sun is up, there is a morning twilight in the forest. Quite an eerie effect.

After about an hour, there is a little roadside cafe where I have coffee with Patricia and Billy, the Irish couple from both coasts of Ireland and with Robert from Toronto. He is ecstatic because he has found his missing meds – in his backpack in a seldom used pocket. The German sisters pass me and one of them, Patricia, shows me a bottle of red wine that she has in a pocket of her backpack. So that is how they have resolved the red wine issue. We agree to drink it later today.

Later in the day I walk out of the woods to a vehicle set up to service the pilgrims. Again this is a good stop and I buy a drink similar to Gaterade. It tastes good and anything to boost energy is great by this time in the day. I am about to leave when Robert appears. He has been lying down, fell asleep on the grass and is walking about looking a bit stunned. Because he is wandering here and acting a bit bewildered, I ask him if he would like me to walk with him the three kilometres down a winding descending path in the forest. He says he would so that’s what happens.

We arrive in Zubiri where I have booked a bed in a gite. Robert comes with me and is able to get a bed there as well. I think he’s lucky, because beds are still pretty scarce. The gite is well done and uses pass-cards to access the dortoirs. That’s a nice touch because the town, with an industrial centre, is big enough to have people capable of theft. The German girls are here, as is the couple Marcel and Mirielle from Strasbourg and their friends from Colmar. We sit outside in the back garden in the sun and drink the red wine that Patricia has carried all the way from Roncevalles or somewhere en route.

Today I was thinking about my emotional state when I was in the gite at Orisson with all the Americans and the fact that I did not much like it. What was going on with that? I think it might have been because for five weeks I have usually been the only native English-speaker and therefore something of a rarity, unique so to speak. And apparently I don’t like being not unique.

But is my uniqueness based on my ability to speak a specific language? Surely not. And the same goes for what I do or did for a living, where I live, my age, sex, religion, and all those other groupings that we humans use to conveniently categorise others. So what makes me unique? What makes me ‘me’ and not anyone else? I thought at first that it must fall somewhere in the relationships that we have with others. But then I recalled that hermits, who may have no relationships with others, are still unique. So that’s not it.

Perhaps my sense of uniqueness is an illusion, created by the individually-focussed society in which I live. Perhaps if I lived in a densely crowded and large country like India, I might not have this sense of uniqueness. So at the moment I don’t have an answer to the question; “What makes me unique?” Perhaps a better question is; “Am I unique and, if so, how?” And an even better question is; “Does it matter that I am or am not unique? Does anything in my life or in my awareness change either way?” Things to ponder.

Later in the dortoir, one guy speaks long and loudly on his cell phone, then talks with his bedmate for another 20 minutes or so. The lights are out and the outside light is fading. The other people in the room are all in their beds, either sleeping or trying to sleep and this rather ignorant guy is either unaware or doesn’t care about the rest of us. I am really tempted to speak out; “Taise-toi” but I don’t. Eventually he gets the message and quits talking. I think he’s Italian.

Today the weather dawns bright and clear. It is quite cool, which is a very good thing since there is a long climb ahead of me. Although I have done the worst (i.e. steepest) part of the ascent, I still have about 20 kilometres to travel and about 600 metres more of climb before I get to Roncevalles. I have breakfast with the group, the language is mostly English, which is a huge change from the last month. I will talk later about the effect on me – it isn’t entirely good.

I see the woman whom I helped yesterday but I don’t know whether she will call for a ride or attempt the next section. From here it looks difficult, even for me after five weeks of steady walking and hill climbing. All those hills over the last weeks are like hills with training wheels. Yesterday’s climb to here was brutal and I know that today’s, while less steep overall, may still have particularly difficult sections. I would give her odds of less than one in a hundred of making it from here to Roncevalles on foot.

So off I go. The part I can see in front of me is a steep climb up and around a corner. When I get there, the landscape opens up and I can see forever. There are huge hills, a few outcroppings of rocks and very few trees. What trees there are, are stunted. Except for the rocky bits, it is all upland meadow. The chemin winds off into the distance, always climbing, but not steeply.

At some points it is level or even descends a bit. I could do without the descents because I know I will just have to climb back up around the next bend. The chemin here is a road surface, wide enough for the occasional vehicle that labours past.

Off to the sides are pasture lands, with a few scattered concrete block structures that take me a little while to figure out. They are three walls, no roof, about five feet high, in the shape of a shallow rectangular ‘U’. They all face the same way, so it’s easy to figure out where the prevailing wind is. They are shelters for the herders if they get caught up here in bad weather, which is both common and extremely dangerous. You just sit down inside the arms of the U, cover yourself with whatever clothing you have and wait the storm out.

The shelters also work for pilgrims caught out here, if they can figure out what the shelters are. There are multiple warnings for pilgrims about not attempting this option in anything but good weather. I saw several signs in Saint Jean and in both the gite and the pilgrim welcome centre in Saint Jean we got verbal warnings. One pilgrim dies here this week and I would guess that there are more who go unreported or underreported. It would not be good for business to advertise the losses on the mountain.

There are herds of cattle and sheep on the steep hillsides, no fences anywhere. At one point, there is a vehicle stopped with pilgrims clustered around. When I get there I see why. They are offering drinks, chocolate bars and cookies, as well as the last opportunity to get a stamp in the pilgrim passport in France. What amazes me most are the prices.

If this were Canada, I would expect to see prices elevated as steeply as the surrounding landscapes. Instead, a chocolate bar is half a Euro, less than I would pay in a store in any town. So the couple operating this little ‘store’ must be pilgrims too or at least very sympathetic to pilgrims.

I walk up around a corner and there are horses, a small herd of them on both sides of the road. The stallion is over on the right, standing quite still, quite alert and clearly the head of this herd. He is big, brown with huge strong legs and now I know where the expression ‘hung like a horse’ comes from.

There are perhaps a dozen mares and two foals, one a colt and the other, a patchwork of brown and white, staggering along beside its mother, trying to get milk and not quite succeeding. This foal is only a day or two old at the most. Her attempts at walking, legs out to the sides for balance, remind me of my granddaughter Bella, when she was trying to figure walking out.

I can see ahead a couple of kilometres where tiny figures are slowly making their way up a slope off road to a point between two rocky outcroppings, where they disappear. This may be the Col d’Elhursato (Elhursato Pass) at 1152 metres, the second highest point on this leg of the chemin. I get to the point where the chemin finally leaves the road and heads off up the hill. The path is good, dry, a few rocks, mostly just hard surface and steep. Slowly, slowly I climb, drinking lots of water and taking frequent rest stops, just noting that each step, no matter how short, is moving me in the right direction.

And the good news is that this IS the first of the two passes, so only one more to go before I reach the steep downhill into Roncevalles. There is an enormous feeling of victory and satisfaction at this point. This has been an arduous demanding climb … and I have made it.

Beyond the pass the chemin continues over rolling ground. At one point the path is over a small mass of dried mud and stone. I look uphill to the left and see that there has been a small landslide at this point which accounts for the hummock of extra material on the path. That would have been an interesting moment. I pass a stone maker that says Navarre and I assume that I am now in Spain. There is no other indication of a border that I can make out.

The path continues to climb quite gently until I pass Roland’s Fountain. Roland was the officer in charge of Charlemagne’s rearguard as he retreated from Spain. The rearguard was caught in this hills and killed to the last man by the local Basques. The Basques were quite properly annoyed because Charlemagne’s army had pillaged Pamplona, a Basque city, as it moved north.

Several centuries later the ‘Chanson de Roland’, the Song of Roland was written. This song is to France as the King Arthur story is to England, the heroic myth of larger than life and braver than life characters from a time shrouded in history.

I continue walking until I enter a huge beech forest. The ground is steeply uphill to the left, steeply downhill to the right. The path is marked with upright posts on the right, one every 50 metres. They are sequentially numbered starting with one and have at eye level a little legend ‘SOS 112’ with a telephone symbol. It’s clear that people get in trouble up here and this is a very quick way to locate them accurately.

In the forest there is a small memorial to a 64-year-old Japanese pilgrim who died here in 2002. It is just another reminder that we are all here temporarily.

Still climbing very gently in perfect walking weather, I come to the Col de Lepoeder at 1440 metres the high point on this whole section. Almost immediately I come to the steep descent into Roncevalles. The advice we have all been given is to take the road to the right, which is what I think that I am doing but instead I take the off-road trail down through the trees.

It is a steep descent and would be deadly in rain or mud but I have neither today. I stop where there is a convenient tree trunk as a seat and have some of the sandwich I brought from Orisson. The two German girls catch up to me, big smiles, chatting with me as they pass.

Again, slowly, slowly works. This isn’t a race so it doesn’t matter that I am likely the slowest person on the path. There are reported to be at least 400 beds at the gite in the Abbey at Roncevalles, so I am not concerned about finding a place to sleep.

And I finally arrive. Roncevalles is a tiny village of 30 inhabitants, a huge church and abbey, a hotel and two restaurants. The gite is inside the abbey structure. I am here at one and the gite doesn’t open until two, so it’s stack the backpack and poles against a wall, off with the boots and on with the sandals. And here are the German sisters, Victoria and Patricia and the Dutch woman Natalie. Her father has not yet arrived.

I get into a little potential trouble when I ask Natalie if she has an adapter for the European power outlet. This is because I still think she’s American. I am looking for ne to borrow to recharge my camera battery, since I lost mine weeks ago. She says; “No, we all use the same power plug in Europe” and that is when I discover that she is Dutch, not American. I apologise for the error, since many Europeans, not to mention most Canadians, do not want to be mis-identified as American. She laughs and says that it is not a problem for her. That makes it not a problem for me.

The enclosed courtyard is covered with white stones, easy to walk on but very bright in the sunlight. It is just a little to cool to sit in the shade so I move to a bench on the sunlit side of the courtyard opposite the gite door. The story is that the gite is one huge dortoir or sleeping room, so imagine my pleasure when I discover that it has all been renovated with modern facilities and cubicles or ‘boxes’ of two bunks in each. I am assigned bed 121 which is, happily, a lower bunk.

I talk with the German sisters and they want to know how I learned German. I tell them about my service in Germany and they want to know when that was. When I tell them they laugh and say; “Our mother was 10 that year.” That puts everything into perspective, so I tell them that they could easily be my granddaughters.

We decide that they are honourary granddaughters, which gives me a total of six grandchildren, two by blood, Cian and Bella Thatcher, and four honourary; Craig and Kaitlin O’Hagan – who were named honourary grandchildren when it didn’t seem as if Carroll and I would ever have any – and these two lovely young women from Leipzig.

At about 6 PM in walks the woman from New Orleans, the one I helped yesterday. I can scarcely believe that she is here, and neither can she. She says that she is so tired, but she is also quite triumphant. She has accomplished something that she was sure she couldn’t do. It is a great illustration of the relative importance of physical strength and mental strength. She had a weak moment yesterday and she is now confident that she can go all the way to Santiago … and I expcet that she will. She goes off to get a bed and sleep.

My granddaughters and I have dinner together at one of the restaurants where I had previously made a reservation. I had been warned that it was necessary to make a reservation. There are about 400 pilgrims here and two small restaurants. Do the math. I offer to buy dinner but they will only agree if I buy one and they buy the other, so that’s the deal. It turns out that I have to pay for all three in advance, so they don’t get to pay. After dinner, Patricia very shyly tries to give me 10 Euros. I tell her, no, just some red wine, which I intend to mean a glass of wine for later. They agree and then it’s off to bed.

It is early to bed again here. The gite closes at 10 and the lights are off until 6 tomorrow.
And, oh yes, I found a friendly American couple from Portland, Oregon with a power plug adapter which I borrowed and recharged my camera battery, so I am good to go again.

I leave the Ferme Gaineko Etxea before 8. There is heavy fog below us in the valleys and the tops of the trees are just above the fog, making for a surreal and quite beautiful image. I am heading for Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, just about five years and one month later than planned. This was where I intended to start my pilgrimage walk in 2007. It didn’t happen because the airline lost my backpack and I waited in Pamplona for five days until I realised that their promise of; “It will be there in the morning” was nothing more than empty air. By the time I came to this realisation I did not have enough time to get to Saint Jean Pied-de-Port and walk back to Pamplona, so I started from where I was.

This is beginning to feel like closing the circle. I have walked from Pamplona to Santiago, from Le Puy en Velay to Saint Chely d’Aubrac and from Saint Chely to here. From Saint Jean, Pamplona is only four days away and will complete the 1500 kilometres from Le Puy to Santiago.

After about an hour’s walk, the young German cyclist whose name is Dietmar, pulls up beside me and starts to walk his bike. We end up walking together all the way into Saint Jean, another four hours. The walk is mostly level between hills that get higher and higher – but still no mountains. Although we are not very high, the tree line is just below the top of most of the hills. They are green on top and often I can see cattle grazing in the high pastures. It would be nasty up there in a cold rain or with wind.

Dietmar wants to talk. He has been riding for three weeks from somewhere north of Bordeaux and today is his last day. He has a train out of Saint Jean late this afternoon. He is from Minden and he is pleasantly surprised that I know where Minden is. Not far from where I was stationed in northern Germany, there is a place which is a natural focal point for any invasion force from the east. It is called the Minden gap. He wants to know if most Canadians know about Minden. I have to break it to him gently that only Canadian soldiers of a certain age who served in the north of Germany would know Minden.

He is a very young-looking 35. I guessed him at 20 to 26. And his is a depressingly familiar story. He was in architectural school, then dropped out because of family illness. First his mother, then his father got ill and eventually died. By this time he had a job running a machine making cigarillos. He tells me that it’s a good job, although his interests are history and geography. Seems like an awful waste to have someone like this making cigarillos.

He talks about how he sees parallels between the chemin and life. I agree completely. Every day on the chemin is a miniature slice of life. At one point he asks me if I would prefer to walk alone. It’s a very caring gesture, because sometimes people really do need to walk by themselves. But I don’t at the moment and I get a strong sense that he wants to talk. Part of this, I recognise, is that this is his last day and he doesn’t want it to end. I know exactly how that feels.

When we finally arrive at Saint-Jean I drop my backpack at my gite and walk down with him to a crossroads where we sit and have a beer. He still has to find the station and take his bike there, so we hug each other and he heads off to the train station. I meet Francois near the church and we hug each other. Hard to believe I ever called him weird Harold. He seems to be less sad and quite willing to talk with people.

Saint Jean is named because it is at the entry to the pass to Spain. It was heavily fortified with a still-standing wall because it stood between the country to the north and all potential invaders from the south – and there were many. There are dates like 1527 and 1620 on some of the tiny buildings lining the main street in the old town inside the wall.

I go back to my gite, L’Esprit du Chemin. It is a very different operation from the many more commercial gites. With the exception of the owners, everyone here is a volunteer
from elsewhere. At the moment, there are three; Katherina from Germany, Wilhelmyne from Holland and Judy Gayford, the president of the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims. All three speak excellent English, as does Huberta, the gite owner, which makes my life a little easier. Today is Judy’s last day as a volunteer here.

I have picked this gite on purpose. Five years ago when I was planning my first trip on the camino, I intended to walk from Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, I booked a bed here in this gite for the first day of the trip. The the airline lost my backpack and everything I had, including where I was staying, the phone number – everything. So I guess the bed went empty. Anyway, they were very upset and sent an email to my address at home, telling me, correctly, that this was not the act of a pilgrim. So for five years I have waited to get back here, explain what happened and offer to pay for the missed night. Huberta tells me that I can put a donation in the box, only if I like, for the missed night. Which is what happens and all is forgiven.

I ask if I can spend another day here, but they are already fully booked for tomorrow. My name goes in the book if there is a cancellation. At dinner they have a lovely ceremony. Huberta asks that each of us say who we are, where we are from and something about our own experience on the chemin. We are one from Ireland, one Northern Ireland, two Americans, five French, two Dutch, two German, one Dane about my age, one Canadian. When it’s my turn, I tell my story, then read that little passage from my book and ask another pilgrim to tell it again in French.

Dinner is lovely, all cooked and served by the volunteers, who join us at the table. Later that night, I am lying in bed in the room shared by the Irishman and the Dane. The Dane, Erik, mentions doing UN duty in Somalia, I mention doing UN duty in Cyprus. He asks when I was there. I tell him the summer of 1968. He was there at the same time as a platoon leader in the Danish battalion while I was the Deputy Commanding Officer of the armoured reconnaissance squadron. He remembers – I find this astonishing – that my unit’s name was the Fort Garry Horse.

So we served together 44 years ago, we never met, and now we are here sharing a room in a gite in Saint Jean Pied-de-Porte. Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

If I can stay here tomorrow, I will. This is a lovely gite, very special. If not, then I have to decide to either go to another gite if I can get a bed or head out to Roncevalles by one of two routes. I don’t have to decide until morning.

Last evening while sitting in the church just prior to the pilgrim service, Jean-Pierre (the big Belgian) quietly asked me; “Is religion important to you?” I answered; “No. How about you?” He said; “Not now so much. It used to be very important.” And I wonder, of all the people walking this path, for how many is religion important? Certainly based on the numbers at the service last evening (about 40) and on the numbers who crossed themselves at the appropriate moments (2) there are not many Catholics here.

And many at the service were there because there was a little welcome with refreshments – that always gets people out – afterward. The church, we found out, was originally catholic, then Calvinist – they would not have approved of all the gilt and colourful statues, then Catholic again.

I had mentioned the Scots couple last evening. This morning at breakfast in the place I am staying there they are. They are Kevin and Linda Clarke of Stirling and they are riding from Le Puy to Santiago for a charity for Motor Neuron Disease, of which the best known in North America is ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. If you are interested their website is www.justgiving.com/Kevin-Clarke6.

I have a little experience with this disease. At the Hospice at May Court I had a patient with ALS, a delightful man able to speak only with his eyes and with the help of his wife, a sheet with all the letters arranged. She would point to a row. When she had the right row he would blink, then she would scroll across until the right letter when he would blink again. Primitive but effective.

They have lost two friends of their own age, just turning 60, in the past two years. They left Le Puy on what would have been the 60th birthday of one of the friends. We exchange contact information and off they go. I wish them; “Bon chemin.”

I am out of Navarrenx about 8:30 on a cool but promising morning. It’s overcast but the forecast is for partly cloudy, no rain. Just on the outskirts – which doesn’t take long – I overtake a young couple taking off their rain gear, which is too hot and unnecessary at the moment. I recognise them from the really nasty rainy day a few days ago. We speak and I can’t place her accent, so I ask where she’s from. “Nashville, Tennessee”. Well that explains the accent.

She is Genah (pronounced Gina) Loger and she is walking to Santiago with her French husband of almost two years, Jean-Francois. I ask where they met, expecting it to be here on the chemin or something akin. No, they met in Korea at a small remote Buddhist temple. He was there to learn and then teach martial arts. At one point he was a junior monk for about 18 months, then realised it wasn’t for him. She went there for a few days to relax. She was asked if she would stay and teach English to the monks. She stayed five years.

They were there together for two months before they spoke to each other, both of them very shy. He was no longer training to be a monk. Once they spoke she says that it was only days before she knew they would be together. They married in Nashville about 20 months ago. I asked her whether they had considered marrying in Korea and she laughs and says; “No, I wanted the whole white wedding dress thing.”

So that’s what happened. And today is his 30th birthday! I guessed her age but luckily I was wrong by four years on the good side. Always risky, guessing a woman’s age. Just a few days ago I did the same thing but guessed on the wrong side by four years. I think that I have been forgiven.

Today I walk on the road all the time. The chemin goes off into the woods but the word coming back from people ahead of us is that the trail is very muddy and they strongly recommend taking the road. Where the chemin crosses the road and I rejoin it, there is a little roofed structure with tables and benches and stacked cans of various kinds of pâté. There are my five French friends and while I am sitting there along comes Remi! We greet each other enthusiastically and compare notes. He walked the chemin this morning and is mud to his knees.

Out of Navarrenx the road is flat through farmland and rises lowly to a crest. On the crest the view is magnificent. Can’t see the Pyrenees, too much distant haze but the land drops away steeply into a huge flat valley, dotted with farmsteads and stands of trees. I walk down the road into the valley, talking to the cows and birds and horses – with bells on. That’s got to be annoying.

I am heading for a gite just short of Aroue. It is called the Ferme Bohoteguia. No, I can’t pronounce it either, but we are in Basque country now. We will see lots of ‘X’s and ‘K’s in the names. For example, tomorrow I will be staying just outside Ostabat at thhe Ferme Gaineko Etxea. Try pronouncing that. I am going to have to ask when I get there.

When I crested the hill just back, I looked at the extremely hilly country ahead and thought; “This looks like the Afghan hill country with trees” and the people are just as fiercely independent as those pesky hill tribes. The Basques speak a language which has some similarities to Finnish and Hungarian, but is not Indo-European in origin. There are lots of local languages, including Occitan and Béarnese, but these are variants of Indo-European languages.

When I am about half an hour from my destination I spot a little roadside restaurant, which is advertising to pilgrims. Finding a place like this is uncommon in France, unlike Spain, where the locals have figured out that the pilgrim traffic isn’t all destitute. Here I think that they are about 10 years behind, but they will figure it out … or they won’t. The French are pretty set on their style of life which, frankly, is pretty good as a lifestyle. They don’t take commerce too seriously, at least not here in the country.

I go in, order a beer and a sandwich and frites. While I wait, along come Genah and Jean-Francois. I thought that they were way ahead of me. They sit down and next here comes Remi. I realised after I said goodbye to him at the roadside stop that I didn’t have a photo of him, so I take this opportunity to remedy that fault.

While we are eating along comes the Japanese girl, Kieko, who is a friend of Genah and Jean-Francois. In she comes with her tin flute and immediately starts to play … and she doesn’t stop until the couple get up to leave. It is a little unnerving to have a conversation with a background, actually a foreground, of mostly Irish reels on a tin flute. I begin to understand how the Pied Piper got into so much trouble.

Kieko speaks English, very little French and plays her flute – I am speculating here – as a way to keep from having to converse too much. She does say that if she weren’t Japanese, she wouldn’t learn Japanese. It is too difficult with too many rules. She wants to walk to Santiago, but doesn’t think she has enough time on her visa and, if she doesn’t make it now, she won’t be able, financially, to come back for 10 years.

We three leave and I last see Keiko, playing her flute, walking slowly along a winding French country road. Remi walks with me as far as the ferme which is my gite, then walks on with a big; “See you in Saint Jean Pied-de-Port”. He will be there tomorrow, I on the next day, so we may well overlap. I hope so.

The gite is wonderful. It really is a working farm and the lady there is renowned for her hospitality. She is tiny, well vertically challenged, not lean and when her face is in repose it is stern. But it is a mask, behind which lives a wonderful sense of humour and when she starts to laugh, her face scrunches up like a paper bag. I have a photo of her close up when she can’t help smiling.

At dinner I sit with a dozen French and one Belgian, who has walked from his home. There is a lot of good humour and quite a lot of talk about what the chemin means. During the evening, I decide to get out my book and ask if someone can translate a short passage, which goes as follows: “I feel different from when I started this in mid-April, more at peace with myself. I know and accept who I am. Is there anything else? I still don’t know. Does it matter? I still don’t know that, either. The physical camino is over, but I think that the real camino is inside me, and it has just begun.”

Two people at the table take on the task and, when they have agreed and finished, I ask if one of them will read it out to the assembled people. They do so and I get a lot of enthusiastic agreement about what I have written. So it seems to strike a chord in these pilgrims … and I like that.

Then it’s off to bed in the dortoir, because it is going to be a longer walk tomorrow, about 25 kilometres.

Since I went to bed at 9, I cannot stay in bed until 7, so I am up and dressed before the rest of the people have left. I ask if the French couple who will be in Ottawa in September are still here. They are, so I issue them a formal invitation to join me in Ottawa for a pilgrim’s welcome when they are there. They are just delighted with this and assure me that they will come. We exchange email addresses to make sure this can happen. Then they are off. We plan to share a beer – ‘un demi’, I have learned – later today in Navarrenx. It is only 14 kilometres, a short walk and likely about three hours.

Oh yes, yesterday I crossed over the major multilane highway in this area, the one that links Bordeaux to Pau.

The weather forecast for today has changed from raining to just overcast, so when I leave, I have my rain jacket packed at the back of my backpack. When did I start trusting the weatherman? In France they have the same abysmal track record as in Canada. So within 15 minutes it’s raining and I have to stop and recover the jacket to put it on – which almost immediately stops the rain.

The walk today is all on roads, very narrow, paved, grass to the pavement. The country is very hilly and the roads here have been laid out by the same folks who do the GR. I am on the top of more crests than ever. By now I have been walking for more than a month – it’s the 22nd of May and I started on the 22nd of April, so I figure that I can climb anything and evidently that needs to be tested. So I go up and down steep winding hills. The good news is that the roads wind so much that I can’t see how high I have to climb, so it always looks just on the edge of possible.

Because it has rained so much there are puddles standing on the road and I drag my pole tips through them for fun. And I recall a moment 50 years ago when I was reassured that I had married the right person. (I was already certain, but there is no such thing as too much reassurance). We had our first child, a son Francis and he was just walking. We three went out for a walk in the rain and Carroll not only permitted, she encouraged Francis to jump in the puddles – and I knew that I had a partner for life. She wanted this little boy to get the most fun out of being a child as he could.

Perhaps it is because it is a shorter day today that it seems much longer. I look at my watch, as if that would shorten the time, and note than 15 minutes have gone by. And there are frequent markers telling me how much longer in time it will be to get to Navarrenx. Subjective time is very deceptive, I am finding. On longer distance days the time seems to go by more quickly. Perhaps that is because the destination is far enough away that I am not measuring time to it.

The woods here are dense and I think about Robin Hood, only here it isn’t Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, it’s Robin de Béarn who is the local hero. I have been in Béarn for a few days and am discovering how, for many French, their local political entity is really important. For example when The Three Muskeeteers was written by Alexandre Dumas in the 1840s and set 200 years earlier, all three of the musketeers are from Béarn. By the way, D’Artagnan is NOT one of the three musketeers. Did you know that? I didn’t. And a pertinent question: since these guys were all musketeers, how come every image of them has each of them holding an épée? How come they’re not holding muskets? No-one can answer me. I think the French have a lot to answer for on this topic.

As I walk alone I feel a need to scratch my butt and, to my amusement, realise that before I do, I look back to see that no-one is following me. Can’t be seen scratching my butt by a complete stranger, can I? I wonder what that’s about. English prudery? I was going to write British, but a Scotsman or an Irishman or a Welshman would just scratch, wouldn’t he?

As I come into Navarrenx there is a plaque explaining that the town was fortified in 1316 and later in the 16th century, a wall was built protecting the town square. It was the first bastioned city in France. Béarn was Protestant at the time and the Catholics planned to change that. It was Protestant because Jeanne d’Albret, the queen of Navarre (1555-1572) and the mother of Henri IV, converted to Protestantism and in the custom of the time converted all her subjects at the same time. The Catholic church was understandably perturbed. The town was besieged as soon as the wall was built – bad timing for the Catholics – but withstood the 3-month siege. The wall is still intact today. I am going to go have a look at it. And see if I can find the French folks for that demi.

I don’t find the French folks, but I do find Jean-Pierre, the Belgian sitting outside a little cafe. I have a hot chocolate (anything hot) and go off to explore the town. It doesn’t take long. It is about the size of Fort Henry in Kingston.

The wall is interesting but once you’ve seen it you have pretty well done the town. There is a cigar factory using Cuban workers in a 15th century barracks but watching people roll cigars is much like watching paint dry. It doesn’t help that it is quite cold and still rainy, so sitting outside watching the pretty girls walk by is not an option. Any moment now, spring should spring out.

There is a big fast river here, the Gave d’Oloron, reputedly the best salmon fishing in France. Gave is Béarnaise for river. There is a bridge over it here and the fortress is situated to cover and protect the bridge.

I have walked now over 560 kilometres and the end is starting to be significant. Up until now it has just been a vague idea, way out there. Now it is starting to feel close.

At 6 PM there is a service for pilgrims in the large and ornate church. The service is brief, done by a layman who then follows with a history of Navarrenx which takes at least as long to tell as it did to happen. In subjective time it is about 500 years. This is followed by a little reception in the welcome centre, and who is there but two young German girls whom I have not seen since the first day at Saint Chely d’Aubrac!

At the reception there is a young Japanese woman pilgrim who plays a little recorder-like instrument. The first song is an Irish reel, the second a Japanese lullaby and the third is Ultreia, a pilgrim’s hymn. Very moving. I meet here a Scottish couple who are cycling from Le Puy to Santiago. My first Scots pilgrims. More about them later.

Afterwards I have dinner with 10 French pilgrims in a restaurant. We have the pilgrim’s menu, which is lots of good food for 12 Euros. After dinner the owner’s wife gives us, without prompting, a fascinating history of Navarrenx and Béarn. Basque country starts just south of here and it’s pretty clear that the Béarnese feel that this is the outer edge of civilization.

I am tired before she is finished, but I wait until the end before I pay my bill, say goodnight to my fellow pilgrims and head back to my room. The weather for tomorrow is promising. At least rain is not forecast.