Day 1- Day 4

That night it rained and I spent the early part of the night worrying about the dog. If it were cold, if it was being missed, and so on. At midnight, we got up to check on things, since it was stormy and our rain fly had only been marginally staked (we were camping partially on rock). The worries that I had were set to rest when we found that the dog had gone home (since we went to bed around 7pm, it probably didn’t even miss dinner). This was my first lessons — other people and dogs can take care of themselves and don’t worry until you have reason to worry or something goes wrong.

Standing at the spot of our first campsite

Day Two:

We got up before sunrise and I made tea over our tiny camp stove while Mike got all of our things packed. I had inadvertently left our pot in the drip line of our rainfly, which was lucky, since we didn’t have much water left. I boiled the rainwater and we threw in some rosemary that we had collected along the trail. That, along with some good bread and honey made a great start to another rainy day. The only problem was, all of our things were wet. Our tent was wet, our bags were wet, our clothes were a little wet. And it made them that much harder to carry. We also realized that we couldn’t camp again before we worked out some kinks, so we had to make it to Rocamadour or we’d have no other option but to camp with wet gear. I had also learned that cheap rain pants are not breathable and when hiking uphills, the inside gets wetter than the outside = icky legs. So, I decided to go no rain pants on day two even though it was raining all day. We got to the town of Montvalent in the pouring rain at about 11am to find a restaurant that was open (this is a huge deal at this time of year!) We went inside and dried off while they prepared the menu of the day and some local men and women hung out and drank pastis and another beautiful beverage that I had never seen before. At noon, the workers from the area came and filled the two large tables. We sat with them and ate the meal of carrot soup, celery root salad, blood sausage and mashed potatoes, green salad, cheese plate, almond tart and finally coffee. It was served family style with wine of course and though I had never been excited to try blood sausage, we knew there was no food to be had for hours, so we happily ate what ended up to be very tasty sausage, seasoned with cloves!

Mike writing a thank you note to the people who renovated the wall

After lunch, we hiked again until dusk, making it down to the town of Rocamadour, a city between two cliffs. On the walk, we found an area where someone had been reconstructing the old stone walls. Their work was meticulous and beautiful and Mike wrote them a thank you note and left it in their bucket. When we got to Rocamadour, however, every hotel was closed for the winter, so we had to hike back up the hill to nearby town, making the final leg in the dark. We were cold and everything we owned was dirty and wet, so we set up cleaning all of our clothes and setting up the tent to dry inside the room.

Days Three + Four

The town we stayed in the second night was so small that there were no stores to fix the problems we had faced from our first night camping, so we set off to Gramat. It is the largest town in the area and had a big supermarket. Another thing about Gramat is that it had a duck lunch special that Mike had remembered from his trip down on the scooter. Luckily the place is still open and still serving duck! We got in around 12:30 and the place was packed with people eating and drinking. After a long duck luch, we walked up to the stores and got tarps and garbage bags and more maps. Again, I am amazed by the difference in our attitude towards walking — we would have never walked more than a mile to a store if we were traveling by car or scooter, but it doesn’t even seem to be a burdon. Although, we did end up walking until the point of exhaustion and darkness even on our rest day, so we decided to take another, so we stayed two nights in Gramat and ate duck both days.

Mike hiking; Duck lunch; Checking the maps