Département du Tarn-et-Garonne

Cheerful but limited breakfast at 7:30, and then a small panic when the La Malle Postale van appeared at 7:45, not the standard "after 8am". Six people hurriedly left the table to finish packing and take their bag to the door to be collected... but the van was on a different run and was dropping bags off.

We left around 8am with ponchos on. It looked overcast, and there was soon a slow drizzle.

The walk went through farms and then 3km into a small town (Limogne en Quency) where we bought some bread and cheeses, looked at the church (as always) and headed on. The total for today was to be around 25km, which included three small villages (Limogne en Quency, Varaire and Bach) all about 7ks apart. There was a slow downhill to the first town, but after that it was generally flat - which was good, as there was constant light rain.

There were a few novelties on the way. One was an old dolmen, which was about 100m off the path, and taken as a sign that in Neolithic time, people were settling around those areas. Another was seeing a deer running through a field early in the afternoon. A third was a series of 'cabane", the circular dry-stone structures in the fields that were either shelters or storage - or perhaps wells.

A lowlight was the mud. For the last 8kms it was almost unbroken. The rain was not a problem with ponchos and overpants, and it was cool but not finger-numbingly cold, but the mud was always mud.

The hotel - Gite de Poudally - is a little outside Mas de Vers, which is another non-village collection of a few farms and nothing else. I did not have high expectations, but there was apricot tea on arrival, a cheerful host, big dry rooms and lots of space. Our bags were already here. One lady said it was an hotel, not a gite, which is fine by us. We contemplated going for a walk when the sun came out later in the afternoon, but quickly thought the better of it: it would involve wet grass or mud, and there was nothing nearby to see. Everyone says that May in the south of France ought to be sunny, warm and charming, so we might not be seeing it at its best...

Dinner was everyone sitting at a few long trestle tables. It was surprising how many people spoke good English, and how few people there were German.

Tomorrow is the last day of the Camino. Going only on the distance from town to town, we will have done 350km in 17 days.

34,190 steps, 27.8km and 6 flightsLes mer