Day 11, To Murat-sur-Vèbre, 22 km

Saint-Gervais-Sur-Mare to Murat-sur-Vèbre. 22 km plus the 2.5 extra when I was looking for my watch! 🤦🏻‍♀️

Today was shorter than yesterday, but it was higher and harder. I had planned to leave early to avoid the heat. Leaving before everyone else is a hard thing in a shared room - having your things organized and ready to go, trying not to make noise, not turning on the light. Tricky! But two of us, Cyri’elle and I, were both awake before my alarm went off because we were freezing. Someone else had opened the window in the middle of the night. And then Benedicta and Emilie were up too. (They both left today.) And there was a bit of getting ready chaos. I think B and I left at 7:20 or so. Pretty good! She planned to hitch hike to the closest place with a train station.

We went to the boulangerie to get pain chocolate, something for lunch, and coffee. They’d run out of take out cups but let us use cups from their kitchen. When we were outside having our coffees I noticed I did not have my watch on. I’ll spare you the small panic details but they added two and a half kilometres to the start of the day, and I still left town with no watch. I lost the watch that today’s missing watch replaced on a backpacking trip. So this was feeling ridiculously familiar. End of today’s story - I found the watch at the very bottom of my pack when I got to the gite this afternoon. What was it doing there?

All the fussing meant that I didn’t get away until about 8:20. I started out following the markings for a different GR. But not for long. And then the steep, rocky climbing started, as it has every day in this section, just outside the village.. The chemin went up in the morning. Way up before lunch. And way up again just after lunch. Today’s top was at 1000 metres. There was a lot of cursing at the GR designers. Biggest complaint of the day was that they drag you up what is the tallest mountain of the Massif Central on this route and the trail tops out in the trees! No view. What were they thinking?????

There were views before that. Huge ones. But the highlight of the day was the hillsides covered in beech trees with their buds just about to break. And all the streams and little waterfalls.

I played leap frog all day with Cyri’elle, one of the women I stayed with last night. We stopped for lunch at farm that was almost at the top and had something to drink while a very odd pig nosed around us and our stuff.

And then finally we were out of the mountains into a green world. I can’t say I am not relieved. It will be nice to just walk!

Staying tonight at a private gîte. Cyri’elle moved here when she found out she was going to be alone in the municipal gîte. There is another French woman here who is doing the whole Chemin d’Arles and the Camino Aragones, like me. But she is going to go much faster. She has a chart where she fills in her accommodation and mileage. The gîte has excellent heat!Read more