Oh what a night!

The camino never ceases to amaze us. For once we got ourselves into the nicest set up, a nice condo like, one bedroom guest house in a spacious country villa, complete with washing machine and a larger kitchen and refrigerator. Deluxe! All to ourselves. Nobody else here. May be because they know what we don’t know!

We spent the night in a storm that started at 9 pm and went on all night. The sky lit up with lightning and thunder rumbled on and on. The wind was howling. The storm shutters shook and made all kinds of strange noises.

We were worried about hurricane Erika hitting Florida, we never heard anything about any storm hitting here in the south west of France!

Next the power went out. The house with all the appliances started to go bip bip one after another. Everything in the place got a good power down and 10 minutes later, another set of bip bip as the power went back on. All this went in for a while with the power going down and then back up after a while.

The wind howled and the shutters banged. The thunder and lightning went on for a while. Ed was up the night before for the radio show and now he’s too tired to stay up. It’s his turn to snore up a storm. I lay in bed watching the whole place lit up with the lightning storm through the kitchen windows. It’s so eery. So scary. It’s like a scene from the twilight zone or an Alfred Hitchcock movie! I tried to wake Ed up but he’s so sound asleep I could not get him to respond. I went out and checked all the doors making sure they were all locked. For once I don’t enjoy an empty gite. I wish it’s full of other pilgrims. It’s much less scary.

I try to calm my imagination.

By midnight, the wind calmed down. Thunder and lightning also calmed down. It’s been only a couple of hours? It seemed like it went on for the whole night. My mind at times played tricks on me and I was imagining this place might be a haunted house out of a Halloween scene and that’s everybody knew except the two of us and that’s why nobody came here to spend the night! I started seeing scenes from the Hitchcock movie, the Bates motel, and got really scared. I held on to Ed who had no clue of anything going on around him he was so sound asleep! I finally got tired and fell asleep myself.

Luckily nothing bad happened overnight. We woke up, ate the basket of breakfast and set out for today’s walk.

The scene outside the gite was really messy. Trees branches down every where. As we got in the trail it got worse. Trees down every few meters. We climbed over the trees. We climbed under the downed trees. We walks around the trees or do what ever we can to go pass the massive tree branches that blocked the walkway. The trail flooded at some section, the rocks are slippery and an hour after we started, the rain came! It rained hard and furious, we got our rain gear out. We were so wet and cold.

We walked on.

Remember what we were told? If it’s easy it would not be a pilgrimage! One day it’s the heat wave. Hot. Sweaty. Uncomfortable. Next day it’s wet, raining, windy and cold. And the pilgrims walks on with a smile.

We met many more pilgrims today. I think one reason nobody came to the same gite we stayed at because they found out dinner is not served there. I think we just assumed that all gites would have dinner but that is apparently not the case. Many walked on to the next village and many stayed back at some earlier gites.

We walked through the hamlets of varaire, Bach, vaylats and onto lalbenque where we spent the night. We walked through many more dolmen, dry stone walls and shepherd huts. I am very excited about arriving today, Tuesday afternoon, as that’s the weekly gathering of the truffles market! This region is famous for the black truffles!

Unfortunately, we are a bit early for truffles season. The market opens on the first Tuesday in December to the last Tuesday in March. Each Tuesday afternoon, the Main Street appropriately named “la rue du marche aux truffles”, is filled with crowd of buyers and tourists at the stalls where truffles harvest are sold.

Another day, another arrival. Soaking wet and cold but we arrived.

Wow what a beautiful gite. It’s must be on a couple of acres. The garden is beautiful. But the whole family, father, mother, sons, brothers… Everybody is out cutting down tree branches, cleaning up the mess left from the storm last night.

Inside the gite looks like a lodge. Warm wood ceilings. My first question of course is: what time do you serve dinner tonight. “We can’t serve dinner tonight. We are still cleaning up from the storm. You will have to go eat in the village. ”

Ah the storm took all of us out, not only the power outage, the trees down, now no dinner !!!

But not to worry. I am sure we will find some food. It always work out. It’s a pilgrims’ life!