I wake up during the night to the sound of rain and it is still raining when I get up. The forecast is for several more days of this. The high today will be 12, so I don’t have to worry about overheating. The plan today is for Laurent to take me back to Pomps, from where I will promptly walk back to Arthez.

This is one of those moments when I could wish to have a little less of that authenticity thing going on. The place where I will stay tonight is just two kilometres from here. I could just walk out the door, take the chemin for about half an hour and present myself at the next gite. No-one would know except me. The trouble is, I would know. And I am the only person whom I have to face every morning in the mirror.

Laurent still thinks I’m crazy. Before I get out of the vehicle he tells me that if I have any problem on the chemin, just call him and he will come pick me up. It is a very gracious offer which I hope not to have to accept.

So it’s back to Pomps and walk, wearing all of my rain gear, for about three hours in the cold and wet. I wanted the experience, I’m having the experience that all the other pilgrims go through. Except for those who get a ride.

The rain is steady though light most of the time. Occasionally very heavy. There won’t be any view of the Pyrenees today. I start with my fleece on but have to take it off after half an hour. The weather isn’t hot but I am just too hot with it on. Almost all of the way today is on road, for which I am quite grateful. The only part off road is downhill and slippery with surface mud. At least it’s not deep.

I stop in Arthez to have a coffee and there in the little cafe is Francois, eating a pastry and having coffee. We talk very briefly, I have my grande creme and walk on. The place I am going, the Lawrenson’s, is about 2 kilometres farther down the road. Eddy is a school classmate of Les Foster’s at whose home I stayed in Victoria when I was there April a year ago to speak to the Victoria chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims.

I arrive, quite soaked, about 12:30 and am greeted with a warm welcome. Eddy and Irene are gracious hosts … and they speak English. This is the most English that I have heard or spoken in a month. I get off my really wet rain gear and change into dry clothes. Everything gets hung up to dry. I also stuff my boots with newspaper so they will dry by morning.

I am offered hot coffee which I accept with alacrity and hot milk. Irene asks me if I would like to have lunch with them – paella. I cannot think of anything I’d rather do, so she makes their regular Sunday – this is how I find out it’s Sunday – paella, but more than normal to account for the extra place at the table.

While we have lunch, the rain really starts to come down and it pours intermittently for about half an hour. Folks still out walking will find it difficult and I am extremely glad that I am watching it pour from inside a dry warm space.

We talk about the history of this area. There is lots of it. For example, in a nearby town called Orthez, in February 1914, Wellington fought and beat French Marshall Soult in the Napoleonic wars. It was the beginning of the end for Napoleon. This is also the area of the Cathars, who were the subject of the first crusade by Christians against other Christians and people who suffered dreadfully at the hands of the inquisition. More about that later.

Two other wet pilgrims arrive, a Quebecoise and a Swiss. I am hoping that it will be Joimie and Fanny. but it’s not. They are likely way ahead of me. It’s Sylvie from the Montreal area and another woman from Switzerland.

The first thing I ask Sylvie after the introductions, is if her last name is Parent. She is a dead ringer for Ginette Parent, a dear long time friend, Quebecoise, who now lives just north of Berlin, and Sylvie is about a generation younger. But it’s not.

I sit and talk with Eddy and Irene through the afternoon. We talk about the history of the area, man’s inhumanity to man, religion and spirituality, how they love to walk in France and Spain, our families, our children and how we are all fans of Bill Bryson and the Flashman books. They tell me how they got into the gite business. The French family next door, who were very kind when the Lawrensons moved in 10 years ago, run a small gite with four beds.

After they got to know each other better, they asked if the Lawrensons could occasionally take an overflow person or two, just provide an extra bed once in while. Eventually it got so Irene and Eddy set up a four bed, two room operation of their own. I have a room to myself with two beds and the other pilgrims share a room. It works out very well.

I have dinner with the two ladies and I get complimented on my French by Sylvie. This I don’t expect but I am very happy to hear it. She also suggest that I should make my book known to the Quebec equivalent of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims. They have over 10,000 members, which is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the English group. She also says that many of them in the Montreal area speak and read English.

The weather clears up and it looks quite lovely although the weather forecast for the next two days remains wet and cool. We shall see what the morning brings. I am off to a place called the Abbaye de Sauvelade, where there is apparently a gite called Le P’tit Laa. I say apparently because Eddy tells me that there is nothing there but the ruined abbey. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. It is only about 12-14 kilometres, ought to be an easy walk. I should know better than to tempt fate by thinking like this.

He also confirms something that I have been suspecting for some time. When they moved here 10 years ago, the GR65 passed by their door on a quiet paved road, the D275. Several years ago it got changed so that now the pilgrim path heads off into the hills, adding about four kilometres and a lot of off-road hill climbing. Two possibilities spring to mind. One is that the municipality asked for the change to get the pilgrim traffic off the road for safety reasons.

The other, and in my mind more likely, reason is that hikers want to walk in the woods, not on roads, so the route was changed to accommodate them and, by accident or intention, inconvenience the pilgrims. While we pilgrims are happy to see the woods and hills, we also want a direct route to our next bed. Roads are good, too.

I have a really good sleep in my double bed with comforter. I wake up just before 7 and am dressed and in the farmhouse kitchen by 7:15. The two French couples are already there, almost finished breakfast and ready to go. I have a short walk today, less than 10 kilometres to a fairly large town. I say goodbye to my hosts, strap on the backpack – it is like an old friend by now. It is fairly heavy to lift but once it is on my back and cinched down, the weight disappears.

I have a couple of kilometres to walk to get me back on the chemin. It’s a left out of the farmhouse and another left 10 minutes away. Can’t see the Pyrenees today though. Too much haze . That takes me into Pimbo, which is on the edge of a high escarpment, wonderful view to the south.

Funny name for a quiet little town, but it has been here for a very long time. It was here before Charlemagne took his troops south to consolidate the southern borders of his kingdom and to try to stem the relentless northward push of the Muslims. The myth about Charlemagne making this pilgrimage is just that – a myth. The bones that were found and declared to be those of St. James the Elder had not yet been found, so there was no pilgrimage destination and no pilgrimage, at least not a Christian one.

Here in Pimbo I encounter Francois at the church. I would prefer to walk alone, but he clearly wants to walk with me. I do not know what is going on, but I walk with him. Over the next hour he tells me a little bit about himself. He is from a village in the Ardennes, from which he has already walked 1,600 kilometres with just under 1,000 left to go. Then he intends to walk home, although he doesn’t know if he will be able to make it. He has a hernia which is giving him some grief and he finds his pack too heavy and the belt aggravates the hernia.

As we walk he talks about the plants on the side of the road. We pass what appears to be a huge young orchard but he says that the trees, only about three or four feet high inside the protective sleeves are oaks, so this is a tree nursery, not an orchard. Then he tells me about some of the small wildflowers that we see. I ask him if he is a biologist. He looks at me, laughs and says no, but his older son loved plants and knew all about them. Then he says, sadly; “But he is no more.” I repeat this as a question, although I already know a bit of the story.

We stand together at the side of the road at an intersection with traffic going by on the busier road and it all comes out. His wife of many years developed cancer. By the time it was diagnosed it was inoperable and had spread throughout her body, including into her spine. She was in agony and the medical profession did what they could but nothing worked. The elder son in desperation shot his mother as a mercy killing, then himself. Francois had already lost a younger son in a car accident, so he is quite alone. I listen as hard as I have ever listened in my life. He needs someone to hear his story and to help him understand. I can listen – that is all I can do. He needs to talk through it until makes some kind of sense for him. So I guess this is why he wanted to walk with me today.

He tells me that he no longer believes in the benevolent God of his youth. It is not clear whether he still believes at all or just does not understand what has happened in his life. He decided to walk to Santiago but so far he has not had any breakthrough. In Le Puy he had a long talk with the bishop. He tells me that many people on the chemin have been very kind to him, but like me, all they can do is listen. He talks about a Sufi mystic of some centuries ago who said that you could not find God in the heavens or in the churches, that God is found only within the self. It seems to resonate with him and it sounds a lot like my theory of the human spirit.

My left ring finger continues to give me a little grief. The last section goes partially numb and pale or bluish at the slightest excuse. When I mentioned it to Andre at the gite in Aire-sur-l’Adour he immediately said; “That’s Raynaud’s Syndrome.” When I got Internet access today and looked it up, it certainly fits. That would also explain why the infection on the side of the finger has taken so long to heal. Everything is good now, the finger isn’t in any danger of falling off or, worse, rotting in place, but I have to continue to be aware of it.

I am sitting at a table outside La Vieille Auberge, a little restaurant/hotel in Arzacq. It’s 1 and the communal gite doesn’t open until 2. They have 77 beds … and they have WiFi, if I sit very close to the gite’s welcome centre. It is overcast, just warm enough to sit without a fleece. I have an eye out if any pilgrims whom I recognise come along. So far none that I know.

And then who walks up but Remi, the young guy who sang the Occitan lullaby a week or so ago in Espalais? I saw him yesterday in the churchyard at Miramont but don’t know where he went after that. I find it fascinating how individuals keep popping up in the most unexpected places. Francois and Remi are both staying here in the communal gite tonight.

I recall that a couple of days ago at Monciel I noted that the women – at least two of them – were stunning and I thought that it might be a trend. Today at the gite here, the Centre d’Accueil, the woman staffing the front desk is stunning. Karine is young, lean, tall, blond and has an engaging smile that makes me weak in the knees. She is chewing gum, which takes the edge off just a bit. She is also engaged. So it’s more than a trend and I am going to work out a hypothesis to support my thoughts. It might take a lot of research.

I am in a small room, the Salle Angleterre, with six beds, very close together, but it is indoors and the toilet is just down the hall. I have taken the bed closest to the door. And Francois is in the bed next to mine.

I ask Karine about helping me book rooms ahead of me. She tells me that she can book one, for more than that I need to go to the Office de Tourisme. So she books me for the 21st and I go the Office de Tourisme – turns out it’s part of my research – where the quite lovely young woman (who is married) wants to practice her English and gets me a bed for the 22nd through the 25th. So I am good for seven days out. That takes me as far as St. Jean Pied-de-Port, where I will have to get a guidebook for the Spanish portion. It is very reassuring to have accommodation booked in advance when there is so little of it.

When I was in Aire a couple of days ago, Andre, the host and a 9 times veteran of the chemin, had what sounded to me like really good advice for the pilgrims going beyond Saint Jean Pied-de-Port over or through the Pyrenees towards Pamplona.

His first bit of advice is to go over the high route only if the weather is good and your pack is light. He points out, correctly, that the ancient pilgrims walked the easiest route, not the most photogenic one, so the valley route is more closely aligned with the ancient route.

Secondly, if you really want to see the far vistas, pack a light bag, climb about 8 kilometres up the path, take your photos, come back down and next day walk the valley route.

Thirdly, don’t stay in Roncevalles. It is like a herd of animals leaving there every morning, hundreds of people together. He suggests taking the valley route, staying in Valcarlos overnight, then walking through Roncevalles and staying in, I think, Espalion the next night. In the morning it puts you hours ahead of the Roncevalles crowd.

At dinner, seated at one long table for 30, I sit with a woman, Christine, who tells me that she is from Normandy, near Caen. I tell he that I am familiar with Caen because during the Normandy invasion in 1944, my regiment came ashore near there (I wasn’t there, I was just 7 years old and my military days were years in the future). She gets quite excited and says; “The Canadians came ashore at Bernieres-sur-Mer. I know this because that is where I live and every year there is a ceremony honouring the Canadians.”

I am going to have an early – even earlier – night tonight because I expect a long day tomorrow.

Well, not a good night’s sleep. We are three in a room and the other two guys are fine, but I have a sodium street lamp about 15 metres from the window and it glares all night. It isn’t until the morning when someone asks how I slept – the universal question in the morning is; “Avez-vous bien dormir?” – and I say poorly and why, they ask me why I didn’t close the shutters. Because I don’t remember shutters in the usual course of events. It does, however mean that I can get up at night – twice – and head to the john without my trusty little LED flashlight.

After breakfast most of the others leave and I sit with Andre and Odile a few minutes. He tells me that one of the pilgrims asked him this morning why they don’t have any children. He refused to answer because he finds that type of question both personal and intrusive. He says and I agree that people need to respect each other’s privacy, and that includes the privacy of the people who have chosen to operate gites for the pilgrims. It is a matter of reciprocal respect for privacy. For many people this is a deeply moving experience and personal questions may be quite damaging.

I walk up the long hill out of Aire-sur-l’Adour and at the crest I see the Pyrenees on the southern horizon for the first time. They are big and there is a lot of snow on the slopes and summits. I will be seeing them for the next two weeks as I walk south and west.

I expect an easy walk of 18 kilometres and it is, flat farm land, cultivated fields, tractors doing their thing. I meet the four ladies from Lyon and we share a coffee by the side of the trail. I note that they carry small testaments with them – with 26 children among them, I am pretty sure they are all Catholic, which they turn out to be.

I walk with Valérie for an hour or two and we have a long talk about her first husband.. They were stationed in Germany and he had been gone for two months for an extended exercise in the Mediterranean. His aircraft was performing the safety role for night carrier operations, standing off to one side and something failed catastrophically in the helicopter. It really did fall into the sea and the crew was lost. It was 1998 or 1999. She was 30, with three children, four, three and 20 months. It was a terrible blow and yet at the same time, as the wife of a military helicopter pilot, she had conditioned herself to be able to handle it if the impossible happened.

That didn’t change the grief or the horror of facing life without her husband, but she tells me, in retrospect, it became one of the happiest periods of her life. She said to God; “Well, it is all in Your hands now. I don’t know what You have in mind, but there is nothing I can do to change it.” And that was the way it worked for a long time. She put her absolute trust in God and, for her, it worked and continues to work. After some years she found another man, also with three children and they have three more children between them for a total of 9, ranging in age from 18 to 20 months.

This annual walk for four days with her friends is, for them, total liberty. Andre back at the gite told me that he doesn’t approve of this 4-day pilgrimage and that when they walk together it is not a pilgrimage. In fact they don’t walk together, they walk mostly alone and the four days is the most that they are able to pull out of their busy lives. They are walking from their homes near Lyon to Santiago, four days each year. It is a multi-year commitment. They tell me that they understand that Andre doesn’t understand and that it is just his point of view.

We arrive together in Miramont , a tiny village, about 1 PM. We stop in the churchyard and I go off to find my gite and get rid of my backpack. It doesn’t open until 2:30 so I leave my pack there and go back to the churchyard where the ladies prepare their lunch. I sit with them and for a while lie back on the grass and almost drop off to sleep. About 2 they get organised, because they have another 14 kilometres to go and we say goodbye – another bittersweet goodbye.

I sit in the little courtyard of the gite, Maison Helene, until 2:30 when a woman, black-haired, opens the door. I tell her my name and she looks a little nonplussed. She checks her sheet, I am not on it. And she has no beds, not one. I know that a few days ago one of the hospitaliers called ahead for me, but something has gone haywire here. She calls the other possibilities in town. No-one has my name and no-one has a bed.

Now I start to get a little concerned. I know that beds right now on the chemin are a scarce commodity and not having a reservation could be catastrophic. My plans do not include sleeping out under the stars of which there will be few tonight. Possibility of rain. She asks if she could get me a ride back to Aire-sur-l’Adour and bring me back here tomorrow to continue. I actually don’t care, I just want to have a bed for the night. Finally she calls a place not in my guidebook, the 2010 Miam Mian Dodo. It is a farm gite a couple of kilometres off the chemin. Do I care? She calls, they have one bed left and it is mine.

Then she pours me an aperatif, gratuit, and her husband brings up the vehicle and he drives me a couple of kilometres on winding roads to my next spot.

Except he doesn’t. He drops me in the middle of nowhere at an attractive farmhouse that he says is the gite, bids me; “Bon chemin” and drives away. He is happy that he has been able to help a pilgrim. I schlepp my backpack into the farmyard and put it by the door. I try the door, it’s locked, I make friends with the dog and I sit down to wait. I find it strange that a gite would be locked at this time of day, especially since the phone had been answered earlier. I find it even stranger that there is no sign for a gite at the entry to the yard. That is a first. There is always a sign. As I sit here I get more and more suspicious that I am not where I am supposed to be.

So after some minutes I leave my pack and I walk down and then up the road – it is winding and hilly – for a few hundred yards until I see two men working in a barnyard. I ask them if there is a gite on this road. One of them – I find out later that he is Gilbert, a duck farmer and the owner of the gite – says; “Yes, it’s a little farther along, my wife is waiting for you, you will see the scallop shell at the entry”. What a relief! So back I go, pick up my pack and head for my gite. There on the right is the building, a woman is standing in front and I am here.

It’s a miracle. This is my bed of last resort. I have a double bed in a private room, glass patio doors looking out on a rural landscape, with an ensuite shower and beer in the communal fridge. The place is modern and spotless. There are four more people coming but they have not yet arrived. A shower, a quick wash of some clothes and I am ready for the rest of the day – which is what I am doing now.

The other four people have arrived. Two men retired from the French military, Guy and Christian and their wives, Agnes and Christina. Christian commanded an infantry battalion, Guy was a military engineer. They met at St. Cyr, the French equivalent of the Royal Military College, as young cadets. Christian is very tall and imposing, which reaffirms my belief that it is easier for a tall man to assume a leadership position.

Christine has tried to find me accommodation farther down the chemin based on available accommodation. My walk for tomorrow is less than 9 kilometres but more than 30 the next day. She tries a number of places but everything is ‘complet’. There are large numbers of walkers. They think it is because the 26 consecutive days of rain – of which I only got the last half – delayed the plans of a lot of people and they are all playing catch-up. Also yesterday was Ascension Thursday and another French holiday. A lot of gites are closed because of family events.

Dinner is at 7 at the farmhouse, just up the road 100 metres. Gilbert and Christine welcome us into their house, where dinner is set for all seven of us. We start with an aperitif, Floc de Gascogne, then foie gras with toast, several courses – and end with 30-year-old Armagnac. Now this is country living. And to think I could have been in a room in Miramont with several other people, one of whom would snore and no light of my own.

Today I walk 25 kilometres from Arblade to Aire-sur-l’Adour. It is an easy walk, gentle rolling hills in farmland. At first the crops are mostly vines and barley but it changes to mostly corn as I get nearer to Aire-sur-l’Adour. The last 7 or 8 kilometres are dead flat, almost dead straight on an old railway right-of-way.

And I have to admit an embarrassment. That Roman road that I walked on the other day? I was out by about 1600 years. I mistranslated “ancienne” as ‘ancient’ rather than ‘old’ and I failed to translate ‘voie ferrée’ at all. A voie ferrée is a railroad and an ancienne voie ferrée is an old railway right of way. I still think it would have made a great Roman road.

As I walk today, alone again – this is the third consecutive day of walking alone – I think about helicopters and sex and about the three stages of being.

The helicopters are perhaps because yesterday – I think it was yesterday – as I walked out of Monciel a French military recce helicopter flew overhead at less than 40 metres above the village. As well, I saw then and again today a small helicopter flying circuits. It turns out that there is a military flight training base near here. So that is what triggered the thoughts about helicopters.

What I think about is a story I was told years ago at a party at the home of an American helicopter pilot in Germany. All of the Americans at the party were guys who had completed and survived at least one tour in Vietnam. One of them was a young guy who by any reasonable standard should not have been alive. He should have been one of the more than 55,000 Americans who died in Vietnam.

With a big smile, he showed me a picture on the front cover of a Hughes Aircraft brochure. It was a photo of a Hughes OH5A, universally known as the Loach (LOH, Light Observation Helicopter). It was battered almost beyond recognition. The blades were twisted and bent with chunks out of them. He was flying the aircraft when it sustained the damage.

Here is his story: He was flying low-level, just above the jungle along a road where the Americans were advancing. His job was to reconnoitre the road to keep the American column from being surprised or ambushed.

He flew around a bend in the road and suddenly he was directly above a large unit, hundreds of men, of North Vietnamese or Viet Cong. Either way it was a very, very bad place to be. The aircraft and it crew had no effective protection from small-arms fire and the Vietnamese had learned how to deal with aircraft overhead. Rather than everyone try to shoot at the aircraft, which didn’t work – almost everyone would shoot behind the aircraft – everyone simply pointed his weapon straight up and fired. The pilot had to fly through a hail of bullets and the odds of getting away without many hits was remote.

So he used one of the peculiarities of the Loach. When you pulled up hard on the collective control, the helicopter had a strong tendency to turn hard to the left. He pulled up very hard in desperation, and the helicopter turned hard left – directly into and through the top of a large tree. He was pretty sure that he was dead, but the aircraft flew clear of the tree, shuddering and shaking – but still flying. He looked for a place to land, then realised that the shuddering and shaking had stabilised. It wasn’t getting better, but it wasn’t getting worse either. Landing here was likely going to result in a very unpleasant encounter with the guys on the ground.

He declared a “Mayday” but continued flying and he was able to fly about 40 kilometres to a friendly airfield, where he landed and shut down the engine. He and other member of the crew were unhurt. The aircraft was not even salvageable, but the Hughes Company recognised the marketing possibilities of using the photos of this terribly damaged aircraft as an example of the survivability of their product.

So what is this story doing running around in my head? I haven’t thought about it for years. Perhaps it is the idea of the possibility of life changing in an instant, which happens to people all the time. And perhaps I am thinking about that poor desperate pilgrim who had lost his entire family.

The sex part is easier to explain. There is a big difference in young men thinking about sex and old men thinking about sex. Young men think about sex about 100 times every day. Then they act on the thought as often as possible. Old men think about sex about 100 times every day. Then they act on the thought as often as possible. The difference is in the definition of “as often as possible”.

I am reminded of a wonderful scene from “The Bucket List” in which Jack Nicholson’s character explains his three most important rules for getting old:
Never waste a hard-on,
Never trust a fart, and
Never pass up a toilet

Anyone else out there recognise these truths?

You know that survival and the urge to reproduce the species are two of the most fundamental biological needs for every species. But I don’t think young men sit around and think; “Say, I think that I’ll go out this evening, find a girl, past puberty, of symmetrical features and child-bearing hips and satisfy my primal urge to reproduce the species, since I know how important this is to the future of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.” What they think is; “I really really want to get laid.”

For girls I think that they also don’t sit around thinking: “I’ll go out this evening and find a man who has enough power to protect me and the child we will create together for the period while I am pregnant and for the next 15 to 20 years so that the species can be continued”. I think (apologies to Cindy Lauper) that girls just want to have fun.

My roommate last evening was Franz, a genial and recently retired theology professor from the Universities of Utrecht and Nijmegen. We sat for a long time discussing the phenomenon of the chemin de Saint Jacques. There are so many people walking it for so many personal reasons but they are, according to medieval philosophers, in one of three stages of being. The stages are not necessarily sequential, nor are they all achieved by all people.

The first is the sense of being at one with the universe, everything is all right with the world, or for a person who believes in God, being in a state of grace. This is the feeling that I have at the moment, the sense of being OK with the universe. It gives me a strong sense of inner peace.

The second is the sense of meaninglessness, of terrible solitude, for a Christian the “dark night” when there is a sense of abandonment by God. This, I think, is where the unfortunate man who lost his entire family is at this moment. I hope he can survive it. I think that a lot of people have this quietly desperate sense of meaningless in their lives. I certainly have at times in the past.

The third sense is the sense of simply being, the sense that eastern religions and Buddhism, which is not a God-based ethical and moral system, seek to achieve.

We also talked about positive and negative reassurance, on which I will have more to say soon.

I am in another lovely gite. This one is quite special. Andre has walked the camino 9 times, his wife Odile fewer but still several times. This gite is reserved solely for pilgrims on foot, carrying their backpacks and carrying a credential (the pilgrim passport). There are some unusual rules here. One is that the gite is closed at 9:30, so if you are out on the town, you might as well stay there. A second is that while dinner is offered, it is expected – actually required – that the pilgrims are involved in the meal preparation.

There are two parties of women here, both parties from the area of Lyon. One group of three is finishing here and the other of four women, started yesterday in Arblade and will be walking for four days. The second group is a set of friends who are wives and mothers, in their late 30s, early 40s. Between them they have – are you ready for this? – 26 children. One of them, Valérie, sits across from me at dinner and gets very alert when she discovers that I was once a helicopter pilot. She says that her first husband was a military helicopter pilot as well. I ask; “First?” She tells me that he was a French Marine pilot and when I ask what happened, she says simply; “He fell into the sea”. That kind of ends the discussion for the moment, but we will pick it up tomorrow.

I wake up this morning raring to go. The day’s rest has rejuvenated me and I am anxious to be on my way. It helps that the day promises to be gorgeous, sunny, not too warm and the chemin, I am told, is easy all the way to Eauze. I have discovered that the three Germans will be in the same gite, Chez Nadine, as me in Eauze, which is good to know. They are good people and I would like to spend more time with them.I say goodbye to Anita, Michel and Hervé, and walk out of the gite.

I know where the chemin is as I leave but as soon as I get to the bottom of the hill I lose track. However, I see a sign for the road to Eauze which promises to be much shorter than the chemin so I head off on the road. I am feeling really good, physically and psychologically. I am walking through vineyards, gently rolling hills, the weather is cooperative and I am right with the world.

As I walk I see a sign for “massage pelerin”. I stop, think about it, walk on 100 metres , stop again and decide; “What the hell – why not?” I walk back to the sign, turn in and walk a couple of hundred metres to a house. I knock on the door, a short woman answers, a little hesitant. I ask if this is where the massage is. She calls out to someone, it turns out to be her husband, who comes to the door. He is the masseur. I drop my backpack and poles at the door. We discuss what he can do, what the price will be and we agree on terms.

Then we walk through the house and out another door into a garden. There is a blue tent-like structure, about 12 feet square and it is where he does the massage. It is effectively outdoors. I strip off everything except my shorts (I am North American after all), even my MedicAlert bracelet. On to the massage table for perhaps one of the best massages of my life. The birds chirping and the light light breeze make it wonderful. When he is done I am just about asleep on the table. He covers me with a sheet, tells me to take my time. It’s good advice, I don’t want to move, it feels so good. I get up, get dressed and he asks me if I would like tea. Of course I would.

Back to the house, he makes green tea which we drink together on the stone patio. He is Denis, a pilgrim from four years ago, not from this region. He loved this area as he walked through and in eight months he and his wife and their blended family of seven children had moved here so he could serve pilgrims as they walk through. I am amazed at the dedication, almost obsession, of so many of the people whom I meet who are providing services along the chemin to pilgrims. Many of them are pilgrims themselves and it shows in their welcome and their whole approach.

The path changes to a walk in farmer’s fields, a lot of barley and a lot of woods. The last third of the chemin today is a dead straight, dead flat road which is shown on the map as the ancient road to Eauze. From all appearances this must have been a Roman road. It has been engineered to be flat, wide and straight. At times it is 10 metres lower than the surrounding land, at times up to 20 metres higher. The land height varies, the road does not. That is a lot of construction and the Romans were exceedingly good at engineering and road-building.

It is exactly the road that I would have wanted had I been a Roman garrison commander about 1800 years ago who needed to move troops, equipment or supplies quickly to deal with an unruly local population. It reminds me of the Eisenhower Interstate system, built in the 1950s for exactly the same reason: move troops, equipment and supplies quickly over large distances.

I listen to the birds chattering and singing – they are loud and insistent – and I speculate about what is actually going on. I know birdsong is sweet, but here is an approximate translation:

“Hi, big fellow. Got a match?”
“Sure I have, sweetheart. You from around here?”
“No. I’m just in town for the festival. You?”
“Yeah, me too. Like to have a drink?”
“Sure, I’d love one. Do you want to sit here on this branch with me or would you like to find a place a little quieter?”
“Sure. Your place or mine?”

It actually takes a little longer than that, because these aren’t trailer trash, these are birds from good nests but you get the idea.

I come into Eauze about 1:30, discover that it is the capital of Armagnac (it’s on the sign) and have great difficulty finding the gite. The town centre is a square next to the church and there are a number of roads leading off. I get differing opinions on where the specific street is. Part of the problem is that it is Monday, which seems to be synonymous with closed in this part of France.

I eventually get sent off on a road which is leading me quickly out into the country and I have little faith that I am actually on the right road. I run through scenarios in my mind about what to do if there is no number 43 or if it is not the gite. However when I get to number 43, I am very relieved to see the gite sign and turn in. I stand in the driveway, not sure what to do next, when the lady hanging up laundry calls to me and welcomes me in. I have arrived at Chez Nadine – she is Nadine and the gite is just fine. It is the bottom floor of a house and I have a bed in a two-bed room. The Germans from yesterday are in the next room. We embrace like old friends.

After washing up and doing the necessary laundry, we walk back into town and sit in the square and have ice cream and beer. But first, I want to tell you about the shower incident. You will remember, I’m sure, from any number of movies, the shower scene in which the man inadvertently – or advertently – walks in on the 25-year-old woman in the shower. She is, of course, like a deer in the headlights and, depending on the movie, soft- or hard-porn, biology takes its course … or not.

Well, fast forward 50 years. The man inadvertently walks in on the 75-year-old woman in the shower. She is, of course, like a deer in the headlights but, unlike the movie, this is more like soft horror … or soft humour, depending on your bent. It is not a pretty scene. After all the “Pardons” and “Je m’excuse” and so on, the man withdraws. The incident is not discussed again.

As we sit in the square we get to know each other – dressed. He, Wilfried, is a couple of years younger than me, from the Constance area. The two ladies, Inge and Helga – Inge is his wife of 48 years – are good friends. He tells me that he worked for the company that makes the Airbus, but that wasn’t his area of specialty. He was an engineer specialising in secure military airfield communications. The couple have spent at least six weeks each year for the last 15 years in India working with orphaned children. The women are friends who met on the chemin as they walked, starting years ago from Constance to Geneva to Le Puy to Cahors to here. They walk a long section each year.

When I go to pay for mine beer, I discover that it is already paid. The attempt to pay is funny. I ask the young waitress for the rechnung and she looks at me and says; “Je ne comprends pas” and of course she doesn’t. I just asked for the bill in German. When I ask for it in French, she tells me that it is done. When I ask again, she says; “Stop, stop, c’est deja fait.” Stop, stop, it’s already done. Well.

Back at the gite, I have a room-mate. It’s weird Harold. I first saw him a kilometre before Eauze on the trail. He was standing over his pack, complaining that it was too heavy and that he was too hot. Of course he was wearing a heavy fleece at the time and it’s warm out. The next time I see him is here. He spends all of his time poring over his maps and his schedule. He is my second OCD in 2 days! He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t eat most things, etc. etc. He is quiet, which is good and we don’t have a lot to say to each other. I don’t want to trigger any hidden murderous impulses. I find later that he has already walked for two months from somewhere north of Paris and he is a few months younger than me.

At dinner with the family, Nadine, her husband and 18-year-old son, we have an aperatif, couscous salad, roast pork, frites (that’s a pleasant surprise) and finish with a drop of armagnac. During dinner I am again pressed into service as a translator.

When Nadine finds out where I am staying tomorrow, she is horrified. What has happened is that I have by mistake selected a gite which is not in Nogaro, but about 8 kilometres this side. She suggests one the far side of Nogaro which will give me two reasonable days of 24 kilometres a day rather that one short day and one very very long day. A couple of phone calls – she is efficient – and it’s all fixed. She also insists on a photo with me for the next book. “It’s very important” she says with a big grin.

Off to bed at 9:30. Harold is a quiet roommate.

A rest day today. I have walked about 180 kilometres in 8 days without a break and the idea of a rest day really appeals. I am just at the 400 kilometre mark. This is a lovely gite, spotlessly clean, roomy with really good toilet and shower facilities, even a washing machine and I am happy to be here. I have breakfast with the group who are leaving, then they are gone and I am alone. It is a strange feeling, kind of like having the whole family emigrate to a far-away country. I might catch up with some of them, perhaps not. The weather is good for the walkers today, light overcast, light breeze, warm, not hot.

I keep out of the road as Anita and Michel do their daily cleanup. Then I am invited to have a small midmorning snack with them, sitting outdoors for coffee and a sweet pastry. Anita tells me that they are heading off to a nearby village for a flea market and would I like to go with them. Of course I would. Into the car for a 10-minute drive to Fourcès, where the market is.

The old town is very unusual since the main square isn’t square. It is round, planted with pollarded sycamore trees with five stone benches down each side of a pathway through the centre of the circle. All the stores around the “square” are fronted with a deep arcade. It is very attractive.

The flea market is under the arcade, in the stores and in the centre area under the sycamores. It is a typical flea market, an awful lot of what appears to be junk, but it might be treasure for someone else. We are far from Paris. The dress is indistinguishable from that at a typical flea market in North America. I sit on one of the benches and watch the world saunter by.

I am enthralled by a tall elderly man who sets up four trestles and two flat surfaces immediately in front of me. It takes him a full 20 minutes to do this, moving the trestles a centimetre at a time. I don’t think that I have ever seen OCD in action before, but this has got to be a textbook example. By the time he gets the goods for sale on the tables and arranged, the buyers will have all gone home for the afternoon. When I leave he has just gotten the white plastic cover on the tables. Fascinating and, so far as I can tell, he is oblivious to me sitting there not five feet away.

Anita finds me sitting there and asks if I will join them to taste a local wine. Hardly needs an invitation, does it? We taste an aperitif wine called Ladevèze made from Armagnac. According to the bottle it is the “authentic apéritif Gascon de Ladevèze”. It is 18% alcohol and is made right here in Montreal. I buy a bottle as a gift for my hosts, who are going to regift it this evening for the pilgrims who arrive today. Once again, it is like being an honoured member of the family. It’s a good feeling.

I am further invited to join them with a friend, Hervé, here for lunch. The friend turns out to be a seasoned pilgrim who frequently acts as a hospitalier at various gites. He has dropped in here and will be returning in a few days to give Anita a hand. Michel has been here just two weeks. He walked four weeks from the north of France to be here to help. He met Anita four years ago on the camino in Spain and have remained in touch ever since. A retired air traffic controller, he will be here for two months helping Anita establish the pattern for this gite.

Just before 6 PM, the phone rings. Anita answers it, then passes it to me, telling me; “It’s for you.” I am dumbfounded. How could anyone call me here? I scarcely know where I am. But it IS for me. It is Pierre calling me to tell me that he and Marie are safely home, that they have been reading and enjoying my blog and that they have put a couple of comments on the blog. I had not seen them so I have to go and look.

There is a joke about Condom (I did tell you that there would be tasteless jokes about Condom) and another about Alberto, my Italian travelling companion. Pierre wants to make sure that we have a solid electronic link and I couldn’t agree more. It is deeply moving for me to have this couple go to the effort of figuring out where I am, then calling me.

About 6:30, after having talked to Carroll on Skype, I and all the pilgrims here walk up to the enormous and imposing old church for a brief pilgrim ceremony, led by Anita’s friend, Hervé.

Then we come back here and the three German pilgrims sit outside and start to sing. It sounds like a missionary meeting and I foresee a long evening. But I would be wrong. They sing a couple of hymns, then they switch to Frere Jacques and the like. They just like to sing. We all, three Germans, five French pilgrims, me and our hosts sit outside and break out the fortified wine that I bought this morning. I discover that not only is this wine local, we can see on the distant crest, the actual farm where the wine is made.

The Germans don’t speak much French, the French no German, so God help us all, I am enlisted as the translator between the two groups. Scary. We each have a little shot and make toasts to the chemin, to our various countries and to the peace between them.

Dinner proceeds at the same happy pace, lots of laughter and bad translations. One of the people has been to Canada and visited friends in Vernon, BC. Bear stories appear and I try, with appallingly little success, to tell the joke of how to tell regular bear scat from grizzly scat. It’s the bells. After dessert we are all out of the dining area by nine, including me. It’s off to bed for a 17 or 18 kilometre walk tomorrow to Eauze, pronounced AYooze.

I am out of the gite by 8 AM. The other pilgrims tell me that they had a poor sleep last night because of the noise. Even I could hear it. It takes me about 40 minutes to walk out of Condom and it is an amazing, amusing and horrifying walk. As I walk through the centre of the town, I see at least a dozen young men who are in really advanced stages of drunkenness. I see one whose stance against a wall reminds me of the scene in Cat Ballou in which the gunslinger, on his horse, is leaning against a wall, completely drunk. The evidence of a really big party is all around.

The local authorities have barricaded the whole of the city centre to keep people safe from vehicle traffic, although nothing can keep them from self-inflicted damage. These guys aren’t aggressive, they are in fact quite friendly and when they are able to focus on me, wish me; “Bon courage” or “Bon chemin”. As is quite usual, the signage for the chemin is less conspicuous in the town, so I have to keep asking if I am on the right route. The tables are turned once when one of the drunks asks me if this is the chemin de Saint Jacques and I tell him that I hope so, but I don’t know.

Out of town, the countryside is gently rolling hills, the farms look prosperous, there is haying going on, the strawberries are already ripe and in the stores, the barley is high.

It is overcast and cool with a haze that supports my guess that humidity is close to 100 percent. I have refilled my water bag and sip from it every time I think of it. I have my hat attached to my belt, since there is no sun and it’s cooler with the hat off.

I meet Alberto soon after I leave Condom and we walk together for the day. He is companionable and sufficiently garrulous that I don’t have to carry my end of the conversation. Yesterday, Pierre and Marie said about him, with fondness; “Alberto is SO Italian”. He tells me at one point that the Italian term for the scallop shell, a symbol of the pilgrim’s walk, is “La concha”, which he also explains, in passing, is the less formal Italian term for female genitalia. It creates quite a vivid image for me.

We walk past vineyards and at one point, I see a man checking his vines and I ask him, naively, what kind of wine does he make. It’s the kind of question that must make a winemaker’s hair turn grey. He responds, after a pause to think of an appropriate answer to a dumb question; “Vins de Gascoyne, the best wines in France”. He produces both red and rosé and it looks to be a good year.

We arrive in Montréal-de-Gers about 1 PM, find our gite, deposit our backpacks (it opens for pilgrims at 2) and walk back 100 yards to the town square where there is a bar with outdoor seating under an old arcade. We have a little aperitif and wait until 2, being entertained by a small group of young men, clearly survivors of last night’s bacchanalia in Condom. According to the bar owner, they have been here for several hours, drinking. That is perfectly obvious.

They are loud, boisterous but not obnoxious. Just before 2 they leave to go to their car and drive – horrors, they can barely walk – back to Condom for more revelry. I am so glad that I am not there. I have never been fond of groups of drunks because they can get nasty so quickly and for no reason apparent to anyone but them. As they walk away, one of them has his pants down around his knees and is mooning, probably inadvertently, scandalised little old ladies. I say inadvertently because I doubt he or any of the group could form a coherent intention.

At 2 we return to the gite and get our beds. Since we are the first here, we get our choice. I pick a lower bunk with a window shelf next to it. That gives me a place to put small but critical bits of gear, such as my hearing aids, at night. Better than on the floor where I might step on them as I make my nightly trip to the john. Alberto picks the bunk above mine.

The place is lovely. It’s on the edge of town, up high – actually it’s hard not to be on the edge of town – with a view over farmer’s fields, woods and a couple of small villages or large homesteads. There is a tractor cutting hay in the distance. It is the only noise besides birdsong.

One of my first moves is to ask if I can stay here another night. They are happy and obliging. It turns out – this is a newly-opened gite, only 6 weeks – that I am the first pilgrim to ask to stay over for two nights. The owner, Anita, is German, indeterminate age, speaks French with a delightful lilt. She walked the camino three years ago, then decided that she wanted to open a gite. But she had little money, only a flat in Spain, worked two years at various gites in St. Jean Pied de Port to learn how to operate a gite. She would have liked to sell her flat but the economy was dreadful. Then out of the blue she got a call from a neighbour. Someone wanted to buy her flat. She sold it and that gave her enough money to buy this place and open the gite.

Late in the day two young Norwegian women arrive, both 24, both in teacher training. They are Anna and Tone – pronounced approximately Toone. I tell them about my love affair with Norway and they tell me about their experiences on the chemin. They are walking from Le Puy to Santiago and have planned 10 weeks to do it. They tell me about being in the snowfields on the Aubrac plateau and realising, even for Norwegians and used to winter conditions, that this was a very dangerous place to be. They got lost one day for three hours and were very concerned. I am surprised that no-one died up there. Over the past three weeks I have heard a number of real horror stories about the conditions there. When I was driven through in a taxi, it looked like a scene from Napoleon’s winter retreat from Moscow.

I ask them about the mass killing in Oslo and Anna tells me that her mother, who is a priest, lives very near the island where most of the killing took place and went there to help immediately after the killing. There was not a lot that she could do except console the survivors. They are both very proud to be Norwegians, as they should be, and tell me that the population has just passed five million.

We enjoy a lovely dinner, all 13 of us and get to bed in good time. Everyone except me will be leaving in the morning. Alberto will walk for a few more days, then take a train to Spain and walk the Camino del Norte along the northern coast.

It dawns warm and sunny, should be a good day for walking. It is lovely in the morning, gets a bit oppressive in the afternoon. As we leave Marsolan, Phillipe walks with us for a few hundred metres to make sure that we are on the right road. There are at least three ways to get to Condom from here. The first is a direct walk for 17 kilometres on the road, no place for food or water along the way. The second is via the chemin, about 23 kilometres, wandering over hill and dale, much like a dog’s random trail as it tracks down fascinating smells.

The third, which Phillipe recommends, is a compromise between the two. It is about 20 kilometres, through La Romieu, which has places for food and drink and is also, he tells us, the village of cats. He does not explain further, says it will be obvious. As we are standing at the point where we depart, along comes Alberto, an Italian with whom we have spending some time the past few days. We say goodbye to Phillipe and head off, four of us, on the quiet road to La Romieu.

We are here in about 90 minutes and it is indeed the village of cats. I had imagined a village full of little old ladies with their 27 cats each. I couldn’t be more wrong. There is not a live cat to be seen. What there is is whimsical sculptures of cats more than lifesize, on windowsills, disappearing into or emerging from little crannies in the walls. There are more than a dozen just in this one small square where we are sitting having a coffee. Along comes Nicolas, who has been camping in his tent on the way. He tells us that he cannot sleep unless it is perfectly quiet, so a dortoir in a gite does not work for him at all. We leave him sitting in La .

At La Romieu, we have sandwiches made for later in an epicerie, the usual butter, ham and cheese on a perfectly wonderful piece of bread. We walk on towards Condom, as it starts to get hot and oppressive. My clothes are soaking wet with sweat … again. I have filled my 3-litre soft plastic water bottle at Marsolan and it is a good thing. It is empty just as we reach Condom. As we walk, we talk. Marie tells me about her children. The youngest, 7, is concerned about her mother’s absence for 10 days. Marie’s solution is to prepare a small wooden box of kisses, one for each day, every one a piece of paper with a lipstick kiss and some words of comfort. She says that the kisses are working well.

She also tells me some of Pierre’s background. He had a brother, two years older, who died two years ago at age 48, Pierre’s age now, of heart failure. The brother was also schizophrenic, although that did not figure in his death. We talk about mental illness and its devastation on all those in the extended family. I tell her about my own experiences with mental illness in the extended family.

As we get close to Condom, we have to decide how to deal with what little time we have left together. Alberto goes ahead and I know that I will see him tomorrow, since we have booked the same gite in Montreal. The Equestrian Centre where Pierre and Marie will stay is two kilometres on this side of Condom, while my gite is somewhere in the city. The decision is for all three of us to walk to my gite where I can drop my backpack, shower, then walk back with my friends to the Equestrian Centre. Just as we enter the populated part of Condom, there is a sign for my gite, 80 metres ahead. Bliss!

After getting a bed and showering and changing into clean clothes and sandals, we walk back to their accommodation, where we hope that I can get dinner. My gite does not offer it. We think that since they have 65 beds, one more mouth to feed won’t be an issue. Marie showers first while Pierre and I sit outside and enjoy a cool drink. Then she comes out, looking radiant, while Pierre has his shower. We sit and talk for a couple of hours until we are called for dinner. We are in a little dining room, just four of us – we three and another French man who speaks fluent English. He learned it in Wales. Again we sit and talk and sip on red wine until it gets dark.

I don’t want this to end and clearly neither do they. Eventually I decide that I have to leave and Pierre insists on walking back to two kilometres into town. I embrace Marie – she has tears in her eyes, as do I as we say goodbye. None of us knows where, when or if we will meet again. Pierre has a headlamp and waves it around as we walk along the edge of the busy highway.

When we arrive back at my gite, we embrace and promise to keep in touch – and we will. I ask him to give my love to Marie and he says that he does – often.Then off he goes into the dark. They leave tomorrow morning by bus back to Cahors, where they will pick up their car for the 8-hour drive back to ALsace.

Why so busy? There is a big festival in Condom this weekend. The town of less than 8,000 is more than three times its normal population. This is the 40th anniversary of this Banda festival. Banda is folk music, big bands, accordions, large noisy and energetic crowds. This festival has over time been corrupted to be a huge drunken brawl , mostly young people, mid-teens to mid-20s, for a full weekend.

The noise in the city is incredible. Even in my gite at the very edge of town, close to a kilometre from the city centre, I can hear the noise without my hearing aids. It does not keep me awake for long although it clearly has a negative effect on some of the other people trying to sleep here.

OK, I know that you want to know what is going on with Condom. First of all, the accent is on the second syllable, not the first, so it’s conDOM, not CONdom. And the word in France is préservatif. Second, guess what they make here. Well, you’re wrong,although it was a good guess. What they make here and are famous for is Armagnac, a strong liquor similar to Cognac, but unlike cognac, distilled only once.

However, catering to popular demand, there IS a museum here of population control devices. I do not visit the museum. At my age, nature pretty well takes care of that for me.

Tomorrow I am off to Montréal, where I expect to take a rest day. No, the other one, Montréal-du-Gers. It is much, much smaller and even more French. I am just short of 400 kilometres so far, so more than half-way.