Day 31 September 26 Eauze to Arblade Le Haut

25.5km 395 ascent 451 descent 6:00 hr. 25⁰C

I didn’t sleep very last night, the place was very quiet and we were able to leave the window open, so the temperature in the room was good and the ventilation was good, but the bed only had a rather heavy comforter on it, not a sheet. I was too hot with the comforter, and find it hard to sleep with no covering at all. It’s just not cozy that way.

The breakfast was A1. Lovely fruit salad. Often, if they have fruit, it is the whole nectarine or pear, so I always haul out my Swiss army knife and cut it up to mix with my yogurt. That makes a bit of a mess, and then you have to go wash your hands, blah blah blah. A fruit salad is very civilized.

After breakfast, as I was standing there waiting for Russell to be ready to leave, I picked up and started reading a pamphlet about the Henry IV Hotel we had stayed in last night. Our room didn’t look like any of the rooms shown in the pamphlet! I decided we must have gotten the naughty room. Maybe it was because we were bad and crossed the forbidden bridge the other day. Either that, or we got the mistress suite. We do have two different last names – who would know we are married?

Early on out of Eauze, we followed and then passed a group of 5 pilgrims we had passed yesterday. They are very French, and we never got past Bonne Chemin with them, as far as conversation goes. One of them must be very competitive. Yesterday, he kept us with for quite a distance after we passed him, and then he almost passed us on a very steep ascent. At the moment of being in a position to at least pass me, he fell back. Presumably to wait for his friends. However, he did manage to make it clear that we weren’t faster than him, he just had the constraint of his friends holding him back.

It really isn’t a contest. We don’t purposely race past other pilgrims to show off. We just walk at our own pace. We get passed too!

At one point we came across two fellows standing beside a parked car (out in the middle of nowhere) and seemingly getting their backpacks on and figuring out where to go on their map. I wondered how long they planned to leave their car parked there.

Today we passed by two duck farms (all that canard confit must be coming from somewhere). The ducks were all looking very well fed.

We also passed a very major fish farm, Etang du Pouy. There were a lot of ponds.

We met up with a couple of pilgrims that looked very clean. Their backpacks were also very clean and new looking. I said to Russell, ‘they must have started at Condom’. Their backpacks were big and heavy looking, so they were obviously carrying all their gear. I talked to the lady for a while. They had indeed started at Condom. They were doing the Camino in stages. Two years ago they walked from Le Puy to Figeac (about 250km). Last year they walked from Figeac to Condom (about 252km). This year, they are walking to Roncesvalles. When we did the Camino in 2013, we walked from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago. It seems that French people like to do Le Puy to Roncesvalles, and then Roncesvalles to Santiago. Roncesvalles is the dividing line between France and Spain.

Once again today we mainly walked through vineyards, but we also passed fields of cattle corn.

When we entered Manciet (a fairly large town along the Way although it wasn’t really denoted as being too much of anything in the guide), we witnessed a grape harvesting machine in action.

 It was a self-propelled grape harvester, which went along a row of grapes and vibrates the grapes off the stems. Any leaves and other refuse was separated and discarded. Then there were dump trucks sitting at the end of the rows, waiting for this machine to dump the grapes into their dump truck. This machine was replacing dozens of manual workers.

We stopped at Manciet for a public WC break and a stop to buy lunch materials. We met a pilgrim in the store we said hi to, and he left before we did.

After leaving Manciet, we walked along a very busy highway for a bit. Large trucks were speeding by, and they just about knocked you over from the wind they generated passing by. Thankfully we eventually turned off the highway, and Russell said, this is an example of where we walk 3 sides of a box to avoid the highway. I was fine with that. I just had that feeling that this deviation was going to involve a steep climb, and I was right.

We passed a Wine Chateau, which had bottles of wine for sampling on top of several barrels at the entrance. It reminded me of a monastery in Spain, with a spigot to taste the red and a spigot to taste the white wine. We didn’t check it out, it seemed a bit dicey because of the bottles. Spigots were okay.

Later along the Way, we passed L’eglise de l’hospital. The pilgrim we saw in Manciet was there, taking pictures for a bunch of Chinese students that were there. Not sure what they were all doing there, but they did seem to be on a hiking excursion, they all had backpacks.

Shortly after, the pilgrim taking the pictures caught up to us. He walked with me for a few minutes. He’s from Strasbourg and has two prosthetic knees. He walked from Strasbourg to Le Puy and is now walking to Roncesvalles this year. He’s coming back next year to walk to Santiago. He has to take it easy because of his knees (what he’s doing didn’t sound overly easy to me). He then leaped forward and walked with Russell for a bit. He then said ‘bonne chemin’ to the two of us and disappeared down the road.

We got to Nogaro, at km 21 on our guide (but it doesn’t account for where we started). Coming in to the city we passed a winery with a multitude of very new and clean looking, refrigerated fermentation tanks.  

I was on the lookout for a public WC, which we found, but it was disgusting and I passed it by. That says a lot about a town. We were looking for some picnic tables to eat our lunch, and at the church there was a sign saying there was a Municipal Park with picnic tables, etc. etc., which was 400 meters off the GR65. That’s not very pilgrim friendly. That would amount to about a 1km detour. We settled for a bench outside the church, and had our lunch there. It was a very annoying bench, because the slats were all off at varying and uneven angles, so things really had difficulty sitting on the bench. Anyway, we had lunch with a minimal amount of stuff being sacrificed because it rolled off the bench.

The road we were on, which went right through the center of old city, was a very busy road. There was a steady stream of large transport trucks whizzing by on the narrow street. There was also a bunch of motorcycles that came roaring into the town, and later went roaring out of the town. I was beginning to understand why we were staying at a Gite 2 or 3km out of Nogaro, rather than staying in the big city.

I would have liked to go to a bar and get a Perrier or something before we carried on, so I could use their WC, but there was no bar anywhere in sight, so we just pressed on.

Today, we are going off the GR65, and taking an historic old road to our Gite in Airblade Le Haut. Tomorrow, we will carry on along this historic old road, and eventually get back on the GR65 before we reach Aire sur l’Adour, where we stay for 2 days (our last rest day of the Camino).

We weren’t too sure where to deviate from the GR65. Russell said, ‘okay, we will use your map’. That puts a lot of pressure on me!

I was trying to figure out from the map where to go, when the Strasbourg pilgrim caught up to us after lunch in Nogaro. Someone at the Gite he had stayed in last night had told him that the GR65 out of Nogaro is not very scenic, and suggested he should take the historic old road instead too. How convenient. Together, we all figured out where to go. I noted that the map he had was way better than the Micheline guide we have. The problem with our guide is you never know from what point the distances are taken from. His map showed that.

Leaving Nogaro, we saw a truck full of grapes, emptying their load into a hopper at the winery. We got the impression that grapes from all the farms in the region were being emptied there, not just grapes from a specific farm.

The Strasbourg pilgrim kept in the lead along the historic road, but not by too much, and when we got to L’Arbladoise, our Gite, he stopped and waited for us to catch up and said ‘here is your lodging for tonight’. He said he was going 8km further on, but we might pass again tomorrow. I thought, not bloody likely, but we all said good-bye. He is obviously walking by himself, and I think he enjoyed the brief comradery with us. He didn’t seem too impressed with the wine making practice in this region. ‘Table wine’, he said.

It is another lovely gite. The sign said to wait in the garden until 2pm if you arrived early. It was 1:57pm and the fellow arrived right away, as promised. He gave us cool water with a mint syrup. These syrupy drinks seem to be very popular here. The fellow said this Gite was closing at the end of the week, and he was going to spend the winter in Vancouver, or Toronto. We said, we’re Canadian, from Ottawa. I think he knew that, and was just joking.

It is a very large room, the biggest room we have had yet. Very nice. They have a washing machine, and the lady took our laundry and did it for us. I went for another lovely swim in their pool. This time the water was a perfect temperature. 

They have a beautiful flower garden, big vegetable garden, and a greenhouse.

Dinner was a communal event again. We ate with the 5 French pilgrims we have passed for the last two days, and another French pilgrim.

It was a very nice dinner. Butternut squash soup to start, rice and pork in a prune sauce for the main, and apple bread pudding for dessert.

Of course everyone was talking French, and then Christian, the Gite owner, starting telling us about the history of the region and the historical road in particular, in French. Russell and I understood maybe the odd word, but not much. I wanted to leave and come back up to blog, but that would have been rude.

It was a good day, and I’m looking forward to getting to Aire sur L’Adour tomorrow, and having another day off.

When we got here today, they had a sign saying we had walked 555 km from Le Puy. That is a bit more than walking 540km to my parents’ house in Grimsby. However, according to our calculations, we have walked 627km. This includes sightseeing distances, and about a good 2km per day when you take into account walking to and from our lodging to the GR65. Quite a difference. But a lot of days!