Day 32 Oloron to Sarrance, 22 km

What a great day! It started with a tiny Camino miracle. One of the reasons I have been fussing about which day to go over the mountains was because there was no room available on Saturday night in Santa Cruz de Los Serros, which is when I had originally wanted to stay there. There was a room available on Sunday. That started me thinking about changing the days. But this morning I looked online and saw that there was a room available Saturday. I took it. So decision made not by the predicted weather but by the chance of a nice bed and a reasonable number of kilometres two nights later! So I am now committed- for 4 nights at least - to the schedule I had made. Urdos tomorrow. Canfranc pueblo on Thursday. Jaca on Friday and Santa Cruz on Saturday. So I can stop obsessing about all that!

90 percent of today was easy. All of it was gorgeous. Finally there were mountains - at first in the distance and then by the afternoon they were right there! They are big! And I am not yet in the really big ones.

Early this morning, there were a lot of helicopters and fighter jets flying over. Apparently there are bases in Pau. The sound is so incongruous with the landscape.

New word today: gave … a river that comes from the mountains. The walk was parallel to the gave d’Aspe. Super green, small farms, animals, and eventually, great views.

Second miracle of the day: a picnic table when I had given up hope of finding anywhere to sit that would not land me in cow or sheep poo. I’d walked through a village fully expecting to find a bench somewhere, but there were none. They did have very nice signs pointing towards Compostela though. And then I thought there would surely be somewhere to sit on the lane that the chemin was following. There was not. Too much sun and too much animal poo. Eventually I saw a huge tree up ahead and thought, I’ll just sit under that! And then when I got closer there was a table! Amazing.

There were a couple of very small villages with no services, except for one that had a bar that is only open on Wednesdays. The part of the route that was not easy, was a very narrow, sometimes eroding path that went up high over the absolutely speeding, terrifically noisy gave, the river coming down from the mountains. Scary. I talked out loud to myself the whole way — about 2.5 kilometers. Ugh.

But the walk ended with some incredible roses. The roses are just overall amazing. So many of them today.

A good part of the rest of the afternoon was trying to sort out the state of tomorrow’s walk. I will spare you all the details, but up until just a week or two ago people were being told to take the bus around a damaged part of the road. And before that people were encouraged to take the bus because part of the route goes along the shoulder of a busy road. Very busy. I also wanted to make sure that there was not more crumbly path running up high over the river. Eventually I got Michel, the other person staying here tonight, to call the person who works in the gite where I will be staying tomorrow night, a guy called Eric, who is apparently the person to ask about trail conditions in this area. He said everything between here and there is walkable. A big relief.

I am staying tonight in a monastery. Much smaller and much older than the convent I stayed in before. I only met one monk for a few minutes; they don’t come to where the pilgrims are. The service where they do a blessing for the pilgrims (compline? 8:30 pm) was canceled. So no singing tonight. The person who meets you and shows you around is a volunteer, here for a few days. Again it’s just Michel and I, and we each have our own rooms. There were six people at dinner - Michel and me, the volunteer and his friend, and a man and woman who are just walking for a few days and have their own room. . The building is, from the outside, not spectacular. But there’s a cloister just inside the door and a huge garden at the back and a big huge main room where we had our dinner. Thw cloister is full of swallows - hirondelles, which is such a great word. Funny that the dinner was the same dinner I had at the convent, minus salad. Vegetable soup, a kind of homemade pizza, an apple compote and fresh cheese. But the thing we will all remember about tonight’s dinner is the flies. Why do Europeans not use screens? There were probably 70 flies, circling the table and the food and us. Ugh! The company was good though.

Tomorrow is my last full day in France before I come back to fly home!Read more