1,000km from care and Santiago

After farewelling our delightful guide Pam and the beautiful village of Auvillar, we climbed back in the bus and headed to just out of the village of Larressingle for a picnic lunch at a park by the Pont d’Artigues. This old bridge is located 1,000 kms from Santiago de Compostela, the medieval equivalent of “just around the corner”. Jerome joined us for the picnic.

After a “dejuener sur l’herbe”, and with with full bellies, we commenced our 11km walk to Montréal. It was a lovely day for a walk across beautiful countryside, past farms and through some vineyards. At one point our bucolic peace was disturbed by a French airforce jet out on a training run and flying close to the ground. Nonetheless, it was a lovely walk across fairly flat terrain. We were setting a good pace of about 5.5kms an hour. We met Jerome who, of course, was doing some foraging (a French national pastime) about 2 kms out from our meeting point. He was surprised to see the crack “Equipe Australie” so soon.

We drove into Montréal to get our passports stamped. Unfortunately the tourist office was closed and we were advised there was no one at the church, so we tried the Town Hall, where we had success. The lovely women who was able to give us a stamp turned out to have lived in Melbourne for ten years. She and her family had returned to France in 2021. Turns out, her husband, Sebastian, owns a restaurant in Fitzroy, Melbourne we have been to many times called Bon Ap. It really is a small world. She was both pleased and surprised to see us - six degrees of Gallic separation ou quoi?

We then drove to (the very hard to pronounce) village of Eauze where we had 30 minutes to wander around, get a stamp from an obliging local cafe (Jerome working his smooth talking magic yet again) before heading to the Armagnac tasting.Read more