Rodez

Saint-Come-d’Olt is good enough to have its own page.

It is rated as one of France's most picturesque villages, and that would be hard to argue with that. It is apparently an official designation. The few people we met were also extremely pleasant.

We are staying in a convent in a town that has had pilgrims for perhaps a thousand years. Perhaps it’s a ritual everywhere, but people are sitting in the convent garden soaking their feet in buckets of water.

The convent is in an Ursuline convent about 0.75 km out of town. The room counts as austere, but the building has a great library and amazing wooden staircase that is as it was in the 1200s (allegedly). It is not cold: quite the opposite: we opened the window after dinner to cool the room down.

Anne went to Vespers at 6:30pm and sang along in French with around 15 French hikers and 8 or 10 octogenarian sisters, then we both went to dinner. It was cooked and served boarding school style - fair enough, as it is staffed by volunteers.

One (our guide as we arrived, and Anne's Vespers music book and singing partner) made us all form a queue at the kitchen door, and pointed to the trays. We were passed a bowl of soup (potato based, we decided) by another, given a plate with rice, red-capsicum mix and fried chicken, collected our own caramel log from the next section, then collected a glass, bread and cutlery, and went to sit in the cavernous but light-coloured hall. The tables had carafes of water and red wine. We sat with two Australian women (Lane Cove and Lavender Bay) who used to be special-needs teachers in remote NSW. We had seen them over the last few days, but they are staying another night here. At the end one packed one’s own tray and put it in a large trolley of shelves - like an airline, but 3x higher.

The room was fine. It had a largish bathroom, but no walls around the shower, so you had to use the rubber scraper to dry down the floor. The bed was fine.

Breakfast in the morning ran on the same basis: cornflakes, limitless bread, an urn of coffee and one of hot water, lots of jam, orange juice and yoghurt. All cheerful. As we left, a younger Ursuline sister farewelled us (in good English) at the convent door.Read more