Monday, September 23
Lauzerte to Durfort, 13km
Even with a French eSIM card it’s sometimes difficult to get a good signal. Yesterday was one of those days.
We left Lauzerte to hike to Durfort today, a tiny hamlet “at the crossroads”.
Of the photo
With only three chairs in the whole place, it must be a very small congregation. But still it was a beautiful haunting serene feeling coming across this church way out and away from anything.
Durfort is a tiny hamlet but its on the Chemin de Saint Jacques so it has facilities albeit very limited ones; a small “Relais”; a gas station-pub-restaurant-convenience store type of thing, open 1000 to 1300. The owner of the Relais makes evening takeout meals for the pilgrims but you have to order ahead of time and then pick them at 1900 when he opens briefly for an hour.
As tiny as the village is, Dufort also has a church, a community centre, and the ever present cenotaph, a sad memorial to fallen soldiers of the war.
The accommodations tonight aren’t quite the same calibre as the night before, (or any other night) but, it was clean and quiet and definitely an “experience”
It’s à gîte, a kind of hostel reserved only for pilgrims.
The next town with any accommodations is 16km away, and since we walked 25km yesterday I thought it was too much to do that kind of distance two days in a row. The 13km distance in the guide book must be theoretical because my gps said 16.4km when we arrived.
Our choice at the gite was to either sleep in the main building, dormitory style, or the private cabin that is about the same size as our garden shed. BUT, it has two beds and it does have its own toilet. The shower is in the main building and shared between all the other guests, so you have to be fast.
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