Day 29 Anouye to Morlaás, 15 km

A blessedly short day! Easy walking, mostly down, under a cloudy sky, not too hot! A perfectly pleasant morning. Woods, fields, rural houses. Some dogs - all very proud of themselves for barking me off. There were a few Saturday morning day hikers and dog walkers out.

Gronze lists Morlaás as having all services. And it does, but things like the supermarket and pharmacy are more than a kilometer from the centre. A person could manage that - there and back - after a short day, but who wants to?

I’m staying in a small hotel over top of the bar/tabac - a cafe with no food and the cigarette/lottery ticket/newspaper shop. I went to an actual restaurant for Saturday lunch. Me and all the family parties. Not for the faint of heart being a woman of a certain age eating alone in a full restaurant in France

Afterwards I came back to my hotel room, and I have not left! Rest day! And time to sort out the logistics for the next few days. I’ve run out of ibuprofen. No pharmacies close to the route tomorrow are open on Sundays (!). And there are none at all on Monday until the end of the day. Tomorrow I go over the top of Pau - a fairly big city. It never occurred to me this would be a problem! Okay, I thought, then I’ll find a supermarket. But apparently there are no medications at all in French supermarkets-a measure to support pharmacies. And then there is the Sunday/Monday food issue. Breakfast here tomorrow. I can buy lunch at a bakery here. Then there is a bakery in Pau that is about 15 minutes off the chemin and open until 8 pm on Sundays. I will have to get Mondays breakfast and lunch there and maybe some kind of plan B for tomorrow’s dinner. There looks to be a snack bar in Lescar (where I will stay) but things are sometimes not open when they are supposed to be! And then Monday is long with no services.

I’ve booked tomorrow in Lescar and then Monday in Oloron -Sainte-Marie. And then I’m trying to decide how the next few days go. The most likely option: Tuesday at a monastery, then a long day Wednesday to get to the last possible village/gite before the pass. And that will be the last of France for this trip!Read more