Day 1 August 27 – Le Puy

34⁰ C

The plan was to get up at 6am to go to the Pilgrim’s Mass at the Cathedral at 7am. This was primarily Lynn’s idea, who didn’t sleep all that well that night. The room had an air conditioner and the temperature was fine, but the lack of air was a problem and so it was stuffy and the room smelled of cleaning products. So when the alarm went off at 6am, Lynn had a bit of a headache and really didn’t feel like getting up. Russell was happy to sleep in a bit more. We got up around 8:45am and couldn’t remember if breakfast was over at 9am or 9:30am. Thankfully, it was over at 9:30am. It was a very nice hotel and they had a wonderful breakfast of cereals, yogurt, fruit, various breads, cheese, meats, jams, etc., plus  a fancy coffee machine you operated yourself.

We set out sightseeing at around 10am. It was already very hot and humid. The town is very vertical, so lots of ‘puys’ to climb up and down. There was a Saturday market set up all through the old town with much hustle and bustle.

I knew I wanted to go to the Tourism Office for a specific reason. We went but I couldn’t remember why, and we left heading for the Cathedral.  On rue des Tables there was an artist making pottery outside her shop, and we in to look around. Russell and I fell in love with a sculpture of St. Jacques the Pellegrino that her husband had done. It was very heavy and we didn’t want to lug it around in our suitcase that is supposed to weigh no more than 13 kilo all along the Camino, so we asked if it could be shipped. She said he husband would be there later in the day and to come back and talk to him about it. She was sure it could be arranged.

There was a mass going on in the Cathedral, so we continued to other sights. First we visited the ‘Camino Pilgrim Office’. They had pilgrim passports, t-shirts, information on the route etc. We had received pilgrim passports from the Canadian Company of Pilgrims of the Way of Saint James back in 2013, which we didn’t use then, but are using for this portion of the journey.
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Next we visited the cloisters of the Cathedral, built between the 11^th and 12^th century and one of Europe’s finest Romanesque architectural edifice. 

After that we went to ‘Le Camino’ which houses a display of the Way to Santiago. The fellow suggested that since the exhibit was all in French, and we had walked there already, we should save our money. It was very worthwhile to have gone there anyway because we found out the pilgrim get together was there that evening, and started at 5:30pm, not 6:30pm.

By then, the mass was over in the Cathedral, so we went in and visited. The most impressive aspect of it was, standing in the church by the grand entrance with the doors open, you had a magnificent view of all the steps down to rue des Tables and further down Avenue de la Cathedral. I said to Russell we should get a picture of us starting the Camino after the pilgrim mass tomorrow from there.

We exited via all those steps to the Cathedral, stopped to if the sculptor was there yet, he wasn’t, and then followed the Camino back through town as far as necessary to know where to go tomorrow. Then went and got some supplies and went back to the hotel for lunch.

After lunch, I remembered that what I wanted to get at the tourism office was a walking guide of le puy, so we went back and got that and started to follow it.

It took us back up rue des Tables, this time the sculptor shop was closed for siesta, or  whatever the France equivalent is called.

On our way to climb the 267 stairs to the Rock and Chapel of St. –Michael-d’Aiguilhe, we admired the statue on the Corneille Rock platform of Notre Dame de France. It was erected in the year 1860 with the metal of 213 canons captured from the Russians during the Crimean war. It is 227 metres high and weighs 835 tons. St Michael’s chapel was built in 961 thanks to Gothescalk, bishop of Le Puy, when he resolved to build it when he returned from a pilgrimage to Santiago. It was a technical and human feat built high on a puy. The stained glass windows were incredibly austere and the projections from the light shining through was amazingly beautiful. The stained glass was like the stained glass we saw at a church on the Galilee in Israel built on the site where Jesus said Peter was the Rock on which he would built his church.

At the Chapel of St. Michael we saw the german bike riding pilgrim from the train. We told him of the  new address and time of the pilgrim meet-and-greet but he said he likely wouldn’t make it. We all bid each other a bonne Chemin and parted.

On the way back, we went past the sculptor shop again and he was there this time.  We bought the statue, paid him 30 euro to mail it, and gave him our address. When we left I realized we had no bill of sale or anything to show for the purchase. I’m pretty sure he will mail us the sculpture none the less. If not, we could be out quite a bit of money!

We went down the hill again, wandered about, then climbed the hill again to the pilgrim meet and greet.  It was a good thing we got there at 5:30, because by 6:30pm just about everyone was leaving.

It was nice to have gone. We met quite a few pilgrims setting out tomorrow, including a lady called Christine from New Zealand who had done the Camino from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago, a man from Switzerland who had started from his home town and was going to Santiago, he had already walked 600km to get to Le Puy. We met Michael and Inga from Germany who are walking to Conques, a petite young French girl with a very heavy pack and Jossee from Quebec , both of whom for which this was their first long distance walk, and many others.

After the meet and greet, it was back for our first half board dinner at hotel Bristol.  It was a lovely dinner of soup, veal chop and rice, and a very lovely dessert made from local berries.

It was very hot today, and although the room was cool enough, it was once again stuffy and smelly and very dry from the area air conditioner. Between that and the excitement, it was not a good night’s sleep.

Day 0 Le Puy en Velay  August 26, 2016

 

The Le Puy Way of the Chemin de St. Jacques de Compostella (The Way of Saint James/Camino) is the pilgrim road through France and Spain from Le Puy en Velay to Santiago. We walked part of the Le Puy Way from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago in 2013 (800 km).

There is no denying it was a sportive challenge for us both. It was also, to varying degrees for Lynn versus Russ, a spiritual, cultural, and historical journey that we both found to be a richly rewarding experience. So much so, that in 2014 we walked the Dingle Way in Ireland (200 km) followed by the daunting Via Francigenia in 2015 (1,054 km).

Tempus fugit, as they say. How many more years will we both be able to walk such distances? The answer lies not so much in the stars, as deep within ourselves. Thankfully, we are both still feeling able and very excited to set off on a walking holiday again in 2016. After much research and soul searching, we decided to do a pilgrimage again and walk the first part of the Le Puy Way this year from Le Puy en Velay to St. Jean Pied de Port in France.

This year is an extra special year for Pilgrims walking the Camino. Pope Francis has declared 2016 to be a holy year on the Camino. Normally, to be a holy year, St James Day (25th July) must fall on a Sunday. Since 2016 is a leap year, July 25^th fell fall on a Monday, with the next jubilee scheduled for 2021.

 

Nevertheless, on 8th December 2015, Pope Francis opened the Holy Door at St Peter’s basilica. This is an important symbolic act. Christ identifies himself as “the door” and Pope John Paul II states that the door “evokes the passage from sin to grace”. It was opened to remind us to retain humility. Pope Francis then declared 2016 to be the Holy Year of Mercy. 

 

Pilgrims have been travelling to Santiago de Compostela for over a thousand years. Godescalc, Bishop of Le Puy, who went there in 951AD, was one of the first. At the height of its popularity in the 11^th and 12^th centuries over half a million European people are said to have made the pilgrimage each year, most of them from France.

In medieval times people went on pilgrimages for a variety of reasons:

·        As a profession of faith

·        As a form of punishment for sins

·        As a means of atonement

·        As a way of acquiring merit

·        As an opportunity to venerate the relics of many saints along the way (indulgences were available to people who  visited shrines), and

·        The opportunity to escape their surroundings

 

The number of pilgrims travelling westward to Santiago from different parts of Europe dwindled after the Reformation in the 1500’s and other, political, factors, but never dried-up, and since the 20^th century there has been something of a resurgence.

Le Puy has been pilgrimage center since the middle ages, not so much as the starting point of the French C amino, but as pilgrimage destination in its own right. In fact, it is only since the 1900’s it has been associated as the start of the Le Puy Way.

Le Puy en Velay is an ancient town in a volcanic landscape dominated by rocky peaks rising from the valley floor. The Chapel of Saint Michael d’Aguilhe, built by Godescalc after returning  from  his pilgrimage to Santiago in 951 crowns one puy. An enormous statue of Notre-Dame de France (the lady and child) overlooks the town from another rock high above. The Romanesque Cathedral in the old town houses the 11^th-12^th century cloisters and 17^th century statue of the Black Virgin. 

We made our way to Le Puy starting on August 25. We took a plane from Ottawa, connecting to a plane to Paris through Montreal. We transitioned to Paris time during the week before we left, and slept all the way on the flight to Paris, which arrived at 7:35am, on time.

At the airport in Paris, we got sim cards for our cell phones and 20 euro each worth of time. Russell set up the phones, we called each other and I sent text messages to Kristjan and Kristine at home. We thought the phones were all set up.

At 11:58 we took a train from the CDG airport to Lyon. The Lyon train station was a complete mad house. There were numerous large groups of youth waiting for trains to various adventures. I have been concerned about travelling in France because of all the recent terrorist activity in the country and the busyness at that station was a bit disconcerting. At one point Russell said ‘do you feel better now?’ and pointed at a group of soldiers armed with machine guns walking through the crowds. I looked at the soldiers, all barely old enough to be finished high school and felt nauseous at the thought of how our society has regressed. In the middle ages it was dangerous for pilgrims (wolves, bandits, fever, rivers that were difficult to cross, unscrupulous ferrymen) to travel to Santiago or other holy places, and they were not at all sure they would reach their destination, let alone return home in one piece. Today, the modern pilgrim has to worry about being victimized by ‘Islamic’ terrorists, most of whom probably have no knowledge of the Koran or interest in the Muslim faith, but suffer from mental illness. Imagine those young soldiers having the wisdom to decide whether to shoot someone, and then living with that for the rest of their lives.

From Lyon we took a train to St-Etienne Chateaucreux. From there we had a 6 minute transfer time to get on a train to Le Puy. Earlier in the day I received an e-mail saying the train from Lyon might be 5 minutes late which was making me very nervous. You can pretty much set your watch by these trains in France. Thankfully, the train was on time, and there was a train conductor on the tracks who told us which was the train to Le Puy, so we made it.

On the train to Le Puy we sat with a German pilgrim bicycling from Heidleberg to Santiago. He spoke fairly good English, but he had a cochlear implant so had trouble hearing and understanding us. On that train, a man beside us with his (we presume) wife and son disappeared for a while and came back smelling very heavily of weed. They got off and another black fellow got on that sat across from us smelling and acting very intoxicated. He announced “I’m okay” then opened a bag of chips that spewed all over the place and then dropped a bag with a bottle of beer inside that spilled everywhere. We were getting close to Le Puy so I went to the washroom, only to discover that both the sink and toilet were plugged with paraphernalia from the guy smoking the weed.  I got out of there fairly quickly so as not to accused of being the one to indulge. At this point the black fellow found another beer in a bag that he opened and then seemed quite content, saying ‘I’ve got a beer’. At this point they announced we were at Le Puy, the final stop on the route, and the poor fellow was busy chugging his beer and gathering up his multitudinous bags. We arrived at 5:20 pm, for a total train travel time of 5 hours and 22 minutes.  While at the CDG airport we saw some signs saying you could now fly direct from Montreal to Lyon. Wish that was possible when we bought our tickets!

We wished the German fellow all the best, and I told him about a pilgrim get together at the Camino office at the Cathedral he might like to go to. He was staying the next day in Le Puy as well.

We checked in to our hotel, were glad they knew Macs had booked us there the following night, and we didn’t need to change rooms the next day. Then we went to buy some groceries and later to get a takeout pizza. The fellow said the pizza would take 20 minutes, so we set off to find the Cathedral and the place of the pilgrim get together for tomorrow. We managed to accomplish that before the pizza was ready, which we took back to our room, ate and went to bed. We were pretty exhausted, but pretty good too.  Getting on Paris time before leaving really helped.

 

 

LePuy Way (Anticipation)

Our Pilgrims Prayer

Lord, I ask that you watch over us as we walk the LePuy Way to St Jean Pied De Port.. 

Be for us our companion on the walk,
Our guide at the crossroads,
And our protection in danger,
May we deepen our relationship with you and walk together in solidarity with all God’s creation.
And Lord, you know the burdens we carry in the backpack of our hearts.
Lead us from despair to hope,
And fear to trust.
When we are weary, let us lean on you.
When we lose our way, help us to see the beauty that you led us to discover.
Be for us our light in the darkness,
Our consolation in our discouragements,
And our strength in our intentions,

So that we may arrive safe and sound at the end of the Road and enriched with grace and divine guidance return home renewed and filled with joy, peace, hope and love.

Amen