Chemin, C'mon

Day 1: Arles- Saint-Gilles
Kms walked: 22 kms/ 92 kms
Kms left to Montpellier: 70 kms

Fun fact: in French, "camino" is "chemin," pronounced "sh'mahn." But in the Provençal dialect (which sounds weirdly like Catalan), "chemin" is pronounced "kum-MONN." So now that blog title makes a bit more sense, yes?

At 7:30am, we made coffee in our AirBnB kitchen, applied blister tape to our feet, said good-bye to the Arles Amphitheater, and were off on the Via Tolosana.

We had expected a day's walk through cute little French villages, stopping for pastis in tiny French bars on the way.

This did not happen.

Instead, the Via Tolosana led us out of Arles, and out of Provence. Sunwashed stone buildings and fields of wildflowers began to morph into the cracked gray salt flats and swamplands of the Camargue, a weird little ecosystem in the south of Provence. Here, the landscape is much more scrubby and barren, and everything is horse- or cowboy-themed. Every car zooming by us is a pickup truck driven by a French man with a massive mustache and a cowboy hat to match. But the scenery is what makes the Camargue so bizarre: Wild white horses amble along on barren salt flats, alongside, and I shit you not, WILD PINK FLAMINGOS. The Camargue is France's answer to "what if we had badlands and cowboys in France, but did it in the weirdest way possible?"

So, suffice it to say that there were no little French cafés on our morning walk. To be clear, there wasn't much of anything, including other humans.

By 12pm, we finally reached a town, though I am putting "town" in air quotes. We saw no cafés or shops, but passing by a small ranch we saw a sign: "Pelerin Pause" (Pilgrim Rest), alongside a Camino shell. So we walked in the gate to find a little house with a lovely shaded patio, with tables, chairs, running water, and two adorable dogs. We also met the first human we'd seen on the Camino today, a fellow pilgrim from, of all places, CALIFORNIA.

We hadn't sat down since we left Arles, and were desperately hungry to eat our packed picnic. The sweet rancher who created this rest stop came out to greet us, asked us about our walk, and even stamped our Camino credenciales before leaving us to relax in his blissful little oasis. There's a saying: "The Camino provides," and today it provided exactly the rest stop we needed.

We continued on a few more hours to Saint-Gilles, our stop for the day. The path led us into town by way of the Cathedral, which not only stamped our credenciales and gave us free access as a Pilgrim perk, but also presented a small exhibit about the French Caminos. Saint-Gilles is one of those tiny towns that was created in the Middle Ages just for pilgrim traffic, and hundreds of years later, they're leaning back into that history. The town's very new benches, bike racks, and bollards all feature the Camino shell symbol. Someone smells tourism money!

After a shower and a nap, we had dinner at our hotel's restaurant, where I had an epic rare duck in mushroom sauce, and a gut-busting café gourmand for dessert. That café gourmand was almost worth that long, solitary march today.

Tomorrow we continue on to Vauvert.Read more