We had a late start today as the gite does not serve breakfast until 8:30am! Ed does not have any complaint about a late start as he had to wake up at 2 am to do his Sunday radio show. I was a very supportive wife, I slept through his radio show again. We had taken a private room so Ed can do his radio show without disturbing other pilgrims. The room is very small, I slept on the bed and Ed was doing the radio show right next to me. Not only did I sleep through the radio show, I snored through it. Yesterday was the longest day we walked. The most mileage and by the time we came in we were seeing double or triple! I was so tired. Ed said Norm, the engineer was the radio station, was asking him: “what is that noise in the background? Can you check your headset?” Ed said “it’s not my headset, must be a bad connection.” He did not wake me up and just did his radio show with my noisy snoring in the background!

We ate as much as we could at breakfast as today is another hard day. After we were finished, I asked if we could buy a croissant or some bread to take with us, unfortunately, there is not enough even for the gite today. It’s a tragedy! The village has a shortage of baguettes!

When we left Florida on our way to Paris, we saw a big headline: Paris under siege: Parisians complaint of long line to buy baguettes! The whole city is paralyzed! We were laughing at the headlines. Little do we know, now we are the ones being affected by the baguettes shortage. Baguette is such a main staple for the French people that it is regulated. The price of a baguette is pre-set and the weight of the baguette is also pre-set. No messing around with the baguette in France. Then in August, in years past, if you are a baker and you decide to go on vacation, you must make sure there is a bead by bakery that is open so people can buy their baguettes. Bakers take turn to go on vacation. Starting this year, the law changes. All bakers can go on vacation when ever they wish. So guess what? They all go on vacation. Nobody left to bake the baguettes! What a tragedy! Luckily, tomorrow is September, so we should be on the normal schedule, the bakers should all be back from vacation and the baguette supplies should come back to normal! Only in France!

Everything is closed today. Even the bank is closed. If you are in a small French village on Monday, beware, not much available for you. It’s going to be a long hike day. At least we have fresh water.

I have an old apple in my bag. That will do for now.

We got on our hike. More climbing of course but the trail is much milder today. We started grazing again, watching out for wild fruit trees on the way. First it was purple plums. They are smaller, with yellow inside and a deep purple skin. They are the best. We ate a whole bunch of them. Then next are the black berries. We are both very fond of these black berries. Sweet and tasty. We got peaches. Apples. And that was an all around good grazing day for us. We can’t complaint.

There was a plastic bag of cooked rice marked “fresh food for pilgrim, cooked 8/28/2015”. It was on the stone wall we walked by. We both looked at the bag and looked T each other: should we? We were hungry but I guess not that hungry. I don’t know. I could eat the fresh ripe fruits that’s plentiful on the trail but eating a plastic bag of cooked rice left on the wall is kind of questionable for me at this time. So we walked on.

There is a little bit of cloud but the heat is intense. We sweat profusely. If finally rains at 3 pm but from noon to three, it is muggy, hot and humid.

I wonder who measures the distance on the trail. It seems the morning km are very short. We walk and talk for a bit and check our GPS: 4 km. in the afternoon, as we are dead tired, hungry, thirsty, wobbling in slowly and seeing double, the sign would says 1.4 km and it would take us an eternity to walk that last 1 km. Ed and I are convinced not all km are equal. There is the morning km and the afternoon km. the sign should say “1.4 km, feel like 4.1 km”.

Ed constantly splashed himself all day with water whenever we went by a fountain. We ate a ton of wild blackberries. They are so sweet and so delicious. Ed says the thing we will miss the most will be those wild blackberries. May be we might just come back another year to eat those wild blackberries. Ed said if we had a basket we could collect a basket full of wild black berries every day.

We walked through lots of fields with stones walls and stone huts. The scenery is quite wild and remote. This region is full of an orchid like flowers that the local grow for saffron which is harvested in the fall.

We passed by a nice pilgrim shelter where we found this poem on the wall.

Translated as:

He dies slowly, the one that becomes slave to habit, doing everyday the same camino, the one that never change his shelter, neither the color of his clothes, or who never speaks to a stranger.

Live now, take a risk today, take action right away, Don’t let yourself die now, Don’t deprive yourself of happiness.

So pilgrims, go on,
walk the camino
and don’t deprive yourself of happiness, your steps will be your words, the camino will be your song and the tiredness will be your prayer.

Then the silence will speak to you!

What a beautiful poem. Only those that walk the camino will truly understands the true meaning of those words.

We finally arrived into our destination for today, the village of limogne en quercy. We asked a very nice lady on the village where is our gite for tonight, we had address and all. She pointed us straight forward, up the hill, then turn left, all the way to the other side of the village. What a pain for two poor hungry and tired pilgrims!

We marched on, no rest yet for our tired bodies. We drag ourselves to a place around the corner of the village swimming pool. We found our gite. It’s a beautiful property. Really really nice country home of an elder couple.

We rang the bell. Waited. Waited. Rang the bell again. Waited and waited some more. I almost call the number on the door when an older woman walked out. She is very nice and sweet. She welcomed us into her home.

She showed us our room. Very very nice. And there is even a swimming pool we can go take a swim. Nice!

My next question is of course : what time is dinner? The old lady replied: oh, there’s no dinner here. We don’t do dinner. Only room. Breakfast is here, in this basket, for tomorrow. You have all you need here. You can walk into the village for dinner or you can go a few blocks here and there’s a store you can buy food to make your own dinner.”

There is a washing machine. Yeah! I put all our sweaty clothes into the machine. Try to make sense of the French symbols. Hot water in Celsius. Which button to start? I fuss with it for a while and got it to work.

We look at the breakfast basket. If we eat our breakfast now, we will have no breakfast tomorrow morning! We won’t be able to walk another long day.

We can’t wait till 7:30 pm to go eat in the village. No way no how! We are on the verge of fainting from hunger! We decided to walk to the store. We got salad, tomatoes, salad dressing, green gage plums, apricot, and …. a French frozen pizza!!!!!

When we got back, I looked at the oven. More Celsius temperature to fuss with, trying to make sense of symbols and pictures. They are not all the same like in the U.S. I just hope I don’t burn down this nice gite with my pizza. Ed even got himself a nice small bottle of local red wine. So wine, frozen pizza, salad. And we call it a day.

Tomorrow is Tuesday. All stores should be open. We should be back to our normal schedule of walking with a picnic lunch.

One thing today, we met only one German pilgrim. We have no idea where the rest of the pilgrims are!

At this gite we are the only ones for tonight. We wonder if there’s something we don’t know? Why is there nobody walking today? Anyway we are too tired now to worry about the rest of the group. May be we will see them tomorrow ….