I may have mentioned in one of the earlier posts about there being 65,000 km of long distance trail in France? And that’s only the long distance trails, the GR’s. Well with that many trails there are bound to be overlaps and merges and di-verges, crossover…and a bunch of other things that can mix you up. And sometimes the trails that are merged for a few kilometres aren’t marked as two trails so it couldhappen that when the two merged sections diverge at some point further down the trail, that the trails diverging are not both clearly marked as diverging. I mean, it COULD happen! And it could happen that someone leading the hike gets mislead by the trail markers and misses the point where they diverge by trusting in the French trail marking association to clearly identify the trail. Yeah, it could happen!
This is a repeat of yesterday’s photo of when we arrived at the hotel. But it could easily also be us all geared up the next morning leaving the hotel. Walking through the fields with small hamlets and villages in the distance. One of the travel guides actually calls this the most boring part of the trail because it’s most all just rural; farms and fields. There are certainly a lot of them, farms and fields I mean, but the people we met, out in the fields and in the villages are warm, welcoming, and friendly. We pass through a couple of small villages with nothing much there except for the church. It’s not like when we hiked The Dingle Way in Ireland where every little town or village, no matter how small, had at least two pubs…for every churchWe bypassed the trail with a short cut through a lovely little village and saved ourselves at least a kilometre and a half distance. And got to see this little village instead of another farmer’s field. Stopping to admire another church. I wrote in an earlier post about the strawberry vending machine? Well here’s another one for the books, out in the middle of the country, on the side of the road, with a really tiny village just down the road…a pizza vending machine. I mention this to avoid having to mention that this is also where we finally realized we had been following the wrong trail marker from where the two merged trails diverged 2km ago. Like I said, it could happen!A statue to honour to the pilgrims brave enough (naive and foolish enough) to think they could actually walk all the way to Rome from CanterburyWe’re both in some pain and today is a long day so we stopped a couple of times at strategic intersections to take off the packs and stretch and massage tired muscles and joints, the cortisone injection I had for my knee has worn off, and I mentioned the mishap getting out of the bathtub. Well now Catharine is complaining about her hip joints too.I’m not sure if this is supposed to be inspirational or discouraging; 107km from Canterbury and 1600 still to go to get to Rome doesn’t really inspire meAnother little town and the church Our accommodation for tonight a part of a 1 bedroom cottage, but it has a kitchen, a fridge, microwave, and a walk-in shower stall, (no bathtubs to get injured getting out of.) but no grocery store for miles and we need to restock for the next 2 days, so I get a taxi to take me to the big grocery store to buy €35 worth of food and pay €60 for the taxi fare. And this is/was today’s route. A 19km hike accidentally elongated to 23km because someone didn’t mark the trails properly!
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