In my past writings I have often come across as quite hostile to religion.  In my most recent walk across France and before that in Spain, I came to the realisation that my hostility may be misplaced.  I walked with several people – Marina, Jocelyn, Sophie – for whom their religion was a strong reassurance that they were on the right path.  Religion is for them what the yellow arrows in Spain and the white and red trail markers in France are for me – reassurance. I am not opposed to religion, I am opposed to what many people do with it.

 I’ll give an example that took place a very long time ago, not far from where I walked in France.  One of the really unattractive events of 13^th century France was the destruction of the Cathars, or the end of the Albigensian heresy (after Albi, a town south of my intended route). The Cathars were a peaceful and popular large group of Christians in southern France, whose beliefs did not coincide with those of the Catholic church. The dominant church at the time, the Roman Catholic Church, ordered a crusade in France to crush the Albigensian heresy in southern France.  This crusade came about because the Albigensians, also known as Cathars, did not accept the decisions made about Christianity by men – it was always men – in Rome.

 The Cathars believed in individual access to the Gospels and did not believe in the need for intervention by other people – priests and bishops – between them and God.  They translated the New Testament into the local language and taught it in schools.  The Cathars were merchants and bankers and nonviolent – much like today’s Quakers.

 The church believed that it was their duty to interpret the content of the Gospels for the people.  They believed, of course, in the full patriarchal hierarchy of the church.  They distrusted trade and merchants, and forbade loans for interest.  For a long time the church tolerated the Cathars and their beliefs grew to be very popular in southernFrance.

 In 1209, the pope, Innocent III, called for a crusade against these heretics. It was the first crusade not against the Muslim occupiers of the Holy Land, but against fellow Christians. The nobles and knights of  northern France rallied to the cause. Could it have been because they were promised the lands of any Cathars whom they defeated? It was never a fair fight. The Cathars, like the modern Quakers, were anti-war and anti-killing. Their opponents did not follow similar rules. The war was particularly savage.

 When the fortified town of Beziers, the home of both Catholics and Cathars, was taken, the commander of the northern forces, an abbot, was asked how to deal with the townspeople, since he could not tell the difference. His response? “Kill them all, God will know his own”. And so 20,000 people, many of them devout Catholics, were massacred by a Catholic army bent on saving them from heresy.

 The Crusade was a Holy War, a Jihad, if you will. And if you died fighting in the Crusade, you went directly to Heaven, with a plenary indulgence.  All sins, not matter how sordid, were instantly expunged.  Many people of the time were troubled by the fact that the crusaders against their own co-religionists were given the same forgiveness that they earned when fighting against the Muslims in the Holy Land. The Troubadours made a lot of this.  The radical and fundamentalist Muslims whom we call terrorists, are offered the same attractive deal when they become suicide bombers or die in Jihad.

 The Cathars not killed in the 40 years of war were then slowly and systematically exterminated through a 70-year-long and, of course, nasty, Inquisition. The last Cathar was burned at the stake in 1321. The Cathars were exterminated by a combination of religious intolerance by the Church and greed by the knights and nobles of northernFrance.

 So, my issue is not against religion per se, but against its frequent abuse by the people who claim to be the ones who show the way.  In modern days, one of the Christian groups which in my opinion abuse religion is the tele-evangelists.  For the most part it seems to me that they’re in it for the money or for the celebrity.  There may be some sincere ones but it’s very hard for me to identify them.

My last day in Paris is a lazy one. Will Inrig is in school all day and into the evening, so I won’t be seeing him. Sophie, who is somewhere here in Paris, and who had said that she wanted to meet me in Montmartre – “J’adore Montmartre”, she said – has a friend returning from Vietnam, so she will not be able to meet me. So I am as alone in this enormous city as I ever was on the trail … and here it feels bizarre. I spend my time getting the blog up to date and wandering around the square just on the other side of the cathedral, watching the tourists and the buskers, the painters,  silhouettists with their scissors and quick hands, the waiters in their uniform of braces and trousers. Early in the afternoon I have moules-frites, mussels and French fries. As the sun goes down and the temperature drops with it, I say goodbye to the City of Lights, most of which you can see from the heights of Montmartre, go back to my room and sleep a restless night.

In the morning, I get breakfast served on a tray in my room and do the final pack of my backpack. It is travelling again as unaccompanied baggage, so I have put all the really dirty clothing on top, in the hopes that the smell will discourage anyone from investigating what else might be in the bag. There is no contraband, but there are items that I would like to see at home. I leave at 9, walk over to the taxi stand at Montmartre, where there is always a taxi. Not this morning. At 9:25, just when I am into serious panic, a taxi hoves into sight and I flag him down and get in. Yesterday when I asked, I was told that the price to get to Charles de Gaulle airport was 40 Euros and that it would take only 20 minutes. Again, not this morning. The traffic is dreadful. The driver keeps reassuring me that any moment it will clear up, but as we turn each corner, there is the same sea of red taillights.

My flight to Warsaw is at noon and I am supposed to check in by 10.  10 o’clock comes and goes and we are still on the road to the airport.  But by 1020 we are there.  I go through the whole check-in process and say goodbye to my backpack once again.  I do hope that I see it in Ottawa.  Today is going to be a long day in the air.  My LOT flight to Warsaw is two hours, followed by a three hour wait in Warsaw, followed by a 9 1/2 hour flight to Toronto, two hours to get through immigration and security and a short flight to Ottawa.  While the day is long, the LOT aircraft and onboard service are both excellent, better than Air Canada at one third the price.  The downside is the four extra hours of flying.

We land in Ottawa shortly after midnight and I am met by Carroll.  I am just delighted to see her and to be home.  Even better, my backpack shows up on the luggage belt.  It’s about a 30 min. drive to our home and I fall into bed at 1 AM, which is 7 AM on my body clock.  I am home.

Over the next days and weeks, I will need to assimilate what exactly has happened to me over the past two weeks. Perhaps at some future time I will regret the decision that I made about a week ago, but at the moment, it feels exactly right to me.

I have a restless night, since I need to be at the station for the bus at 8:04. After a breakfast with hot chocolate made just for me I pack my pack, pay my bill and I am on my way to the station. As I approach I see a couple of familiar figures standing there. It’s Jocelyn and Max!  They have finished their journey and are also on their way to Paris. I had not expected to see them again ever and here they are. They took a taxi from where they stayed overnight. Although we buy our tickets together and we tell the agent that we are together, we do not end up in the same carriage. The train is quite full. I sit in a 1^st class carriage with too little legroom so a total stranger (at least she is attractive) and I play kneesies all the way for five hours toParis. We never speak.

 In Paris we  three meet again on the platform, where Jocelyn busily organizes us to the Metro station, then finds out where I have to go. Max has met a friend here and so we say farewell yet again.  Jocelyn and I get on the same Metro car. She makes sure that I know where I am going (I have a Metro route map), then embraces me and gets off after three stops. She says that St. Jacques meant for us to be together all this way. Who am I to disagree?  I have two more stops to go, then a change of train and another few stops to the base of the funicular at Montmartre. Up the funicular, inquire about Rue la Marck. No one knows because it is actually Rue Lamarck. It is the street on the immediate back side of the cathedral and only a couple of minutes walk to number 24.

I push the bell and after a few moments the door opens to a welcome from Maggie, the tiny elderly elfin woman whose home this is. I am shown to my room, lovely, with a garden view and all mod. con. I will be here for a day and a bit, then off to Canada via Warsaw. In the early evening I walk through the square in Montmartre which is a beehive of activity, tourists of every size, age and nationality and the local French selling them food, drink, paintings, almost instant portraits, silhouettes of themselves. It is as far as one can imagine from the quiet and solitude of the past ten days. It’s not wrong, it’s fascinating and it is another way the world works. We are also warned here about pickpockets. I can imagine that this place would be full of them, so my passport and wallet are safely stored away.

 I am now looking forward to going home again. Carroll would be fascinated, as I am, by this particular piece of Paris. One more day …

It’s the 25^th of April and time to say farewell to my erstwhile family of fellow pilgrims: Karsten, Felicia, Jocelyn, Francine and Max. Sophie will be travelling with me today, so it’s not quite farewell for her. We have a wonderful breakfast with Jean-Claude, then have a little movie session in which Francine asks questions and Felicia takes a movie with her camera, then they pack up to leave. It takes a little while because Karsten isn’t ready. In the half-light of dawn, someone has taken his boots and left another pair, same brand, a half size larger. The other person is going to have a long day with too-small boots.

 Finally they leave and Sophie and I slowly make our way to the same bar where I had the beer yesterday and where the transport vehicle will pick us up around 11 AM to take us to Aumont-Aubrac. There Sophie will catch the bus to take her onwards, while I will stay overnight and catch the bus tomorrow (Today’s train to Paris is full – it’s the last day of Easter vacation). Sophie will help me find a place to stay in Aumont-Aubrac. We will have several hours there. It’s warm, peaceful, birds singing, sunny, just a lovely day in this remote valley.

Yesterday evening I was able to get Internet access and book my flight home for Thursday, two days from today. Not Air Canada at around $4500, but the Polish airline LOT at $1674, about 1/3^rd the price … and I get to visit Warsaw, another unexpected treat.

 In Aumont-Aubrac, after a 55-km drive, we find me a room at the Sentiers Fleuris, a lovely welcoming place with dinner, bed and breakfast for 38 Euros. Sophie and I go out for a bite before she leaves. She tells me that she thought about her father a lot during the past few days. He is late 60s, has what sounds like terminal cancer, widespread in his abdominal cavity and lungs. He wants to walk a piece of this trail with her so she plans to come back this fall with him. She tells me that she had a very strict upbringing, left home, made some bad decisions (her words) and after five years was lost and searching.  She met a young priest to whom she told everything. He said that it could all be fixed. She is now a devout Catholic, very happy, 39 years old. It turns out that her birthday is 14 July, same as Carroll’s and that she loves the fireworks (She lives in Paris, where they celebrate Bastille day every July 14th). Every year she figures that they are especially for her.

After our lunch, she goes to the church for a visit, I go back to have a little sleep. At 3:30 she comes back to my place and we walk together to the station. The bus comes, we embrace and say farewell and she is gone. I walk back to the hotel in a rain shower with the sun shining through. The hotel has WiFi, so I compose and send several days of my blog, then have dinner with another wonderful welcoming host, Andre, who does the arigot thing again to the amazement of the assembled crowd. I sit for dinner with two Italians and three Germans, a small family from Munich, all of whom speak good English.

 Overnight I think about staying on one more day here instead of spending two overnights in Paris (Will Inrig has found me a place to stay in Montmartre) but I decide that I would rather get near where my plane will be on Thursday, so I will go to Paris in the morning.

Today’s walk will be a short one, about 15 km to St. Chely d’Aubrac. The reason behind the wide disparity in the distances day to day is because the villages here in the Auvergne are not as evenly distributed as those on the camino in Spain. We are still on the high plateau, but we will leave it today. There is a descent later today of about 600 metres (2,000 feet) from the plateau. It will be interesting to see what effect that has on the weather and on the season. It is Easter Sunday today, so almost everything is closed. As soon as possible I need to get Internet access to book my flight from Paris to Ottawa. It is cool and looks like rain but it doesn’t actually rain, which makes it very good weather for walking. My fleece is off after about 15 minutes. There are many, many walkers on the path today. Most of them are carrying day packs or no packs, so they are probably just out for a day’s stroll … cross-country. The path today is a first – it is actually cross-country, no between fields but over them. Much of it is green fields, with gates, and a worn dirt path across the field. I never saw this in Spain or here before today.

I do not think that I have mentioned the wayfinding. In Spain it was the ubiquitous yellow arrow that led us across Spain. Here it is a small distinctive marking, a white rectangle above and a red one below. This is the marking of a Grande Randonee, or GR, a designated walking path inFrance. There are 180,000 kilometers of GRs in France, maintained by 5,000 volunteers. Every day as I walk, I thank these anonymous volunteers for the work they do. There are two differences between the marking in Spainand in France. In Spain the yellow arrows mark one unique path and they are one-way, towards Santiago. In France GRs are all marked with the white and red, and they are two-way and sometimes cross each other. At one point in a village today I am ready to head off on a marked route when Francine points out that this is GR 6, not GR 65, the one we want. It is easy to tell the difference, but you have to look and be able to see.

Francine chooses to walk with me today. I am being carefully looked after by my little “family”. She confides that she is non-religious and does not know why she is here. She tells that she is from a small city, Besançon, about 220,000 inhabitants, in eastern France near the Swiss border. She is 46, recently separated from her partner of 12 years. He is a generation older than her, five grown children and long separated from his wife. He has recently retired and feels terribly guilty about abandoning his family – I do not know how long ago this happened or whether Francine was involved in the separation, but from what little I know of her it seems unlikely. In any event, he assuages his guilt by spending what little money he has on his wife and children. She seems to be the victim of another person’s poor choices and now she is paying the price. As well, her mother died six months ago. Her mother had left the family home when Francine was 10 and she did not see her again until she was 30. They reconciled before her mother died.

The melancholy seems deep inside her. We spend a lot of time talking and I tell her that she is a loving and lovable person, which is absolutely true. I am very happy that I am here at this point and time in her life, when she really needs someone to tell her that she is a good person. I also tell her that I find her beautiful, which I do. She is not pretty in the conventional sense and has probably never been told that she was pretty. I tell her that pretty is pleasant but passes with time, while beauty is deep within and lasts forever. I see her as beautiful. When she smiles, her eyes smile too. A lovely lady and I am very glad that we are together today. Perhaps our time together today is why I needed to be here on this journey. It certainly feels right for me.

Eventually we start to descend down a long shallow dry waterbed, lots of  loose rock, slow walking and potentially treacherous, but not dangerous if you walk slowly and pay attention where you place each foot. Part way down we come to a clearing where we stop for a rest. I take off my pack and put my head down on the grass between the rocks, covering my face with my hat. Francine does the same, a few feet from me, except that she takes off her boots and socks as well. Francine comments that this is paradise. There are a few spring flowers in the clearing, purple and yellow, tiny. As I doze, I hear people walking past us. One group includes a woman who talks from the time she is within earshot until she disappears around a corner far below. It seems that she is not happy with the silence all around us. But she is soon gone.

After perhaps half an hour we get up, put our gear back on and continue down the trail. Soon we arrive in St. Chely, where Sophie, who was walking ahead of us, has found all of us a place to stay. I was concerned all day since we had not been able to confirm anything in the morning … and there are a lot of people out here. When we enter the village, Francine suggests that I stay with our packs at the first open bar – yes! – and have a beer while she goes to find Sophie. The weather has turned superb and it is late spring here in this deep valley. Two days ago it was almost winter. I am on my second beer, feeling very relaxed when Francine returns with a big golden retriever – the house dog.

We have a wonderful room at the very top of a 15^th century tower. The very long circular stone staircase is worn with 600 years of people walking up and down this staircase. This is the Tour des Chapelains, built to house the many priests who served this entire area, 51 of them. Now it is a welcoming place run with wonderful panache by Jean-Claude Brunier, who serves all his guests an aperitif at 6:45 and tells us the history of the building. Afterwards we go out together for dinner. As usual here, the food is excellent.

This is my last night with the group and I am feeling very loving towards them all. I will miss them but I feel right about my decision to leave. The lesson is that you can’t always achieve the dream but if you don’t achieve it, it doesn’t need to be failure. Failure is the unwillingness to try to achieve the dream … because you might fail. At least I know that I tried and, in trying, I have made a real difference in the lives of the people with whom I have travelled. Feels like success to me.

Today’s plan is to walk to Nasbinal. It’s about 26 km. The day is dark, rainy and cold. The forecast is rainy with the possibility of thunderstorms the next three days. Here in Aumont-Aubrac we encounter a tall, well-setup young German, Max, who speaks good English but almost no French. He joins the little family that we have created and we walk together. He is a friendly, open, delightful young man in his early 20s, about 18 months from finishing a degree in Psychology, after which he wants to travel in the Far East. I wear my rain jacket for the first time and put the rain cover on my pack. It is very cold but not much rain. I walk half the distance, past fields with huge boulders, leftovers from the retreating glaciers of the ice age, then stop at a wide spot in the road called Les Quatre Chemins. It is a crossroads with a burned-out gite and a temporary trailer set up with a little counter and some tables to serve snacks and drinks. Nothing else here – no village, no stores.

My stamina has abandoned me … again … and I decide to get a cab to today’s destination. It will be a two-hour wait for a cab. I am hoping that someone will want to stay with me, but I do not want to ask anyone.  Karsten and the others decide to walk on. Max asks me if I would like him to stay. Francine says that he is a good person, to which he replies that he is just lazy. I say that it is perfectly reasonable and OK to be both good and lazy. Everyone else leaves and Max and I stay together in this rather drab and forlorn little rectangular trailer. It starts to rain heavily. He goes out occasionally for a smoke. (There are still a lot of smokers in France). We talk about all sorts of things. I ask about his good English. He attended a private German school in Milan for three years, as well as 18 months on a school exchange in Christchurch, New Zealand. Unusually for a German, his English does not have a pronounced British accent.

When the cab finally arrives it is driven by an attractive young woman in jeans, very tight jeans. I can see that she has dimples. She is very pleasant and deposits us right at the gite NADA in Nasbinal. Interesting name, since NADA means “nothing” in Spanish.  I sleep for a couple of hours, until the rest of the group arrives. I really feel the need for a day of recuperation and tell them of my plan. Several people suggest that perhaps tomorrow I just get a ride directly from here to our next destination, so that I can have my day off and we can stay together. I agree with this, then we go off to have dinner together at a nearby restaurant. I am feeling strange, not really well and not really here. We return to the gite and go to bed. At 11 PM my pulse is still racing along at 120 beats per minute and I make a decision to pack it up. This is just not working. I expect to have a sense of loss but instead get an immediate and enormous sense of relief.

 I have learned some really important lessons on this walk already. One is that the strong sense of family that Karsten, Marina, Paula and I had four years ago was not a one-off event. Being here with like-minded people in a remote wilderness environment promotes a rapid sense of interdependence. I have heard this referred to by my daughter-in-law Laura (TJ) as “trail magic” and am beginning to understand it a little better. Another lesson, specific to this journey, is how to deal with the loss of a dream, when the plan simply does not work. I shall have lots of time to contemplate this in the days and weeks to come. For the moment, it is enough that the decision, when it is finally made, is a relief, not a burden. My stamina appears to be diminishing, not increasing. While I believe that I could probably complete this journey as planned, it no longer feels necessary and I do not want to discover on the trail that my problem is a real physical one. I think that the issue is likely the combination of no acclimatization for altitude, plus the unusual exertion required in the first few days.

 Tomorrow is a short walk, only 15 km, so I decide to walk it with my pack as far as St. Chely d’Aubrac. At that point (135 km from Le Puy en Velay) I shall finish. It also happens to be where Sophie will finish and return from there toParis. With luck, I shall go with her.

Today I am planning to walk about 20 km to Le Sauvage, a remote farm domain that stretches back to Templar days, about 1,000 years old. It is one huge building complex in the middle of a 5,000 hectare preserve, completely isolated. The driveway from the nearest road is almost three kilometers. I only get about halfway when I am wiped out again, and at La Falzet I stop. This time it’s heavy breathing, continuing high heart rate and a strange visual phenomenon. My eyes will not adjust to the light. I sit here with my head down and my eyes take in so much light that almost everything is blindingly white. This takes about ten minutes to clear back to normal vision. I don’t like this turn of events and I find a ride to take me to Le Sauvage. Karsten and Jocelyn, both very concerned about me, continue walking.

 It’s my oldest son’s, Frank’s, birthday and I cannot contact him. There is no Internet, no cell phone coverage and no WiFi. I hope that his day is a good one.

It’s very cold here. Today’s high is 15 degrees, with a strong head wind and sunny in the afternoon. We are very high and outside it looks like the very beginning of spring. The buds are just starting to show on the trees here. We are told that most years there is still snow at this point but this year is an exception. So we’re lucky

 The gite is good, clean, well equipped but they do not serve meals and there is nowhere else to eat. Mme Chausse, the manager, tells me that produce is available to make one’s own meal. I just go to bed and sleep. After Karsten and Jocelyn arrive, several other pilgrims, including Felicia, Sophie and Francine arrive and they organize a meal for everyone. This helps me a lot and I perk up.

Felicia, 27, from Paris, is a pretty blond clown with an expressive face that she uses to effect. Sophie, 39, also from Paris, is a small elfin woman, short dark hair and sparkling dark eyes, huge toothy smile, with a dancer’s body. Francine, 46, is tall, blond, Aryan-looking, long legs and a lithe body. She is sharp-faced and in repose, looks melancholy, but when she smiles, she smiles with her whole face and eyes. They are all only on the chemin for a short time and all started in Le Puy. They will join us tomorrow so now we are six walking together. I am still hoping for better days.

Today’s plan is to walk 22 km. In the first 90 minutes, I climb out of the Alliers gorge on a path up a cliff side over 300 metres in a 20 percent grade. The cliffs are on my left, the gorge to my right. The views are spectacular but I am more concerned about keeping my footing. A slip here could really hurt!  After we reach the top and Karsten catches up, he tells me that he is afraid of heights and this bit scares him. I am not surprised. It scares me. I have to stop often to catch my breath, my heart is beating too fast … and my legs hurt. Karsten and I meet Jocelyn, a slight 50-something year old from Paris, bright shiny eyes. She tells me that her husband and her adult daughter are opposed to her walking the path alone. She tells them that she will not be alone, she will be walking with St-Jacques. She also tells me that she is happy to join up with us. She is gregarious, openly religious but not trying to convert anyone, a happy person.

 After seven or eight kilometers, another 100 meter climb. It gives me a lot of difficulty. We stop in a small village, Vernet, for a drink. After resting 15 minutes, I am still breathing heavily, my heart is still beating much, much faster than I like and I realize that I have not recovered from yesterday’s descent and today’s ascent from the gorge. It occurs to me that I am pressing perilously close to the edge of the physical envelope and that I don’t actually know where that edge is. I am barely rational and feeling a little panicky because of the high heart rate and the very heavy breathing. It is not quite, but close to, an out-of-body experience. I can picture myself  here, sitting on the bench, head down on the table, just trying to catch up. It occurs to me that, if I keep on now, I could easily drive my heart beyond its limits, and I don’t know what the effect would be. I can picture a little tasteful monument somewhere farther on saying “A Canadian pilgrim perished here on 20 April 2011”  and that is NOT part of my plan. I do not want to be an example to others, at least not like this. So I ask the owner of this little bar, who is in a wheelchair – a farm accident – if I can get a ride into Saugues (pronounced sew-g, with a hard “g”). He offers to drive me and I sag into his car with my gear. He doesn’t want to take any money but I insist. I do not think that I could have done this on my own.

 I get to the gite, sleep for four hours, up for 90 minutes to have a brief visit to the town, sleep another two hours, up for dinner and sleep from 9 PM to 7 AM undisturbed. That’s a total of 16 hours. One would think that that would do the trick. Karsten and Jocelyn arrive before dinner and we share a room. So now we are three.

The dinner includes an excellent beet, tomato and lettuce salad. This is a recipe that I will have to try when I get home. We have local cheese after dinner. Later we are advised that the local cheeses, while absolutely delicious, are also generally not pasteurized, so we should be cautious. How can we tell?

There is a local legend from a couple of centuries back. Local children were found dreadfully mauled. It was decided that this was the work of wolves and so a bounty was placed on them. Finally, a huge wolf was killed … and the killings stopped. There is a huge wolf monument overlooking the town. It is called the Beast of Gevaudan. There are still wolves in the area.

I have thoughts of failure. I had not intended to be carried any portion of this journey. This was not part of my plan, but it appears as if my plan will need to be modified. I am disappointed because I thought that my training was adequate, and it would have been for the Spanish camino, but not this part out of Le Puy. Tomorrow should be better. I think that I am through the worst. Someone points out that we are walking at over 4,000 feet altitude and I am not accustomed to the height. So perhaps that is the problem.

 Here in Saugues in the church there is a Canadian connection. Did you ever wonder where all those Jesuit priests came from who came to early Canadato convert the heathens? One of them came from here. There is an altar in the 13^th century church dedicated to Noel Chabanel, born here on 2 Feb 1613, trained as a Jesuit, was sent to Canada and was martyred by the Iroquois on 8 Dec 1649. He was 36.

 I think that the Iroquois perhaps over-reacted to the missionary effort, torturing and burning the Jesuits, but I do have some sympathy for the Indians. I have always found the concept of sending missionaries to proselytize others both arrogant and condescending. What makes anyone believe that the people they are coming to “save” need saving? Saving from what? What makes them think that the heathens are so burdened in what looks to me like happy lives that putting on clothes and praying to a foreign god will magically transform them? How would we like it if animist priests from Africa came to Europe orNorth Americato bring us the happy news?

 Given that the culture we have imposed on North American includes the destruction of the environment and the wanton overuse of the available resources, I am not at all sure that the Indians were wrong. They should have had a more restrictive immigration program in place.

 Enough grumping for one evening. Off to bed and hope for better things tomorrow.

Only 14 km today, but a very difficult trail. With Karsten, I am heading for Monistrol sur l’Alliers. Over the distance it descends about 400 metres, but most of that, near the end of the day, is a precipitous and extremely dangerous descent – about 30 degrees down – into the gorge of the Alliers River. It is a rock-strewn trail in a forest, bare tree roots, lots of opportunity to turn an ankle or break a bone. This is worse than any portage I was ever on in Algonquin Park and worse than anything that I walked on the Appalachian Trail. This can NOT be the old pilgrim trail. Some pilgrims rode horses and no-one ever rode a horse down this. I think that the intention is to keep the pilgrims off the winding road down, but whoever made the decision is doing the pilgrims a grave disservice. My shoulders and back hurt a lot from using my poles to control the descent and my quad muscles are shaking with fatigue. For the last part of the way down I am concerned that the big thigh muscles will give way. I am so concerned that I neglect to take a single photo of this portion of the chemin. Karsten is somewhere behind me. I realize that neither one of us could help the other if we were to encounter a problem on this portion of the chemin. 

When I get to Monistrol I am absolutely exhausted. I just want to stop where I am, not move another step. Karsten helps when he points out the gite, just a little bit ahead and above us. In the gite I shower and sleep for two hours. I feel like a new man, except that my back and thigh muscles are very sore. I do not realize that this bodes very ill for the next days. There are only three of us in this gite, Karsten, me and a Frenchman named Regisse who is planning to walk the whole distance to Santiago – about 1500 km. The delightful and friendly young hosts here are Nicolas and Coralie. They have wireless here, down in the bottom of the gorge, so Coralie gives me her user name and password so that I can use it. The food is excellent, which I am finding is usual on the French part of “le chemin”. The young couple visits with us for an hour in the gite. The conversation is in French, of which I get only bits. One of the bits that I get is that she is pregnant with their first child, which gives me an opportunity to show off my grandchildren pictures – I never miss a chance.