November 8. Saint-Palais to Larcevaux. 17.24 km

The morning starts in its usual manner with the usual flurry of insults and bad jokes.

We also left really late, at 1030 am, to avoid the heavy downpour, which in turn makes us come in pretty late to our next bed for the night.

Ken’s fondest wish – do not disturb.

The artisans boulangerie where we pick up our daily baguette. Most older people here still show up in the morning for their daily dose of bread. This place is so popular they had to create a side exit door to manage people and Ken flow.

Our little hole-in-the-wall Chinese food restaurant. Run by one man. He has everything pre-packaged, you choose the items you want, and you either take it home to heat  it up or he microwaves it for you.  It was much better than it sounds and is a popular place in town.

Still raining but not so hard now.

Turn here for your first big climb of the day. Good luck.

They kindly labeled the trees and had little signs along the way…but can’t say I stopped for many of them.

I was only about 15 feet away when this branch came down in front of me.  That would have been an ouchie on the old noggin!

The metal ramp is for bikes. Hikers squish through a narrow “kissing gate” which cows are too big for and sheep are too dumb to figure out.

A wet optimal bench thoughtfully provided about a quarter of the way up.

Curse-worthy mud, but only for a very short section.

We arrive at the top to more lovely views and similar statues to the ones we we saw in the museum in Saint-Palais.   They were titled “reflection of the sky”.  Aptly so as we watched these black clouds slowly roll by in front of us.  Blue sky behind.

That shiny silvery road in the middle of the next hill is where we are climbing next. But first we have to go down.

We’re not in Lac La Biche anymore, Toto.

Don’t worry, Kenny. That hill doesn’t look so bad!

The Stele of Gibraltar represents the junction of three of France’s “grand pilgrimage routes” – Via Lemovicensis  (which we are walking), the Via Turonensis, and the Via Podiensis (the most popular one).

This house is across the street from the stele. What a lovely gesture to have this heartening mural, with the word “ultreia” included. Ultreia is Latin for “further” or “beyond” and is used on the Camino as encouragement. A Latin form of “you can do it, yes, you can”!

And the rain begins again as we start our second climb, but it stops after a few minutes.

Now we know why the road appeared so silvery and shiny from the other hill. It was pure slate almost all the way.

We came down from the top of the hill.

We are heading up to a small chapel on the top of the hill, which i remember from some ofvthe videos I watch about the Voie de Vezelay.   But in those videos there were always a few other pilgrims. I figured it would just be the three of us. But I was wrong.

There was a man from Sweden in the shelter but not a pilgrim. He had obviously been sleeping there. He had a big suitcase, backpack, sleeping bag and what appeared to be a lot of map books.  scott got there first and they had a conversation about hockey and hockey fights and thevfact rhat fans lived the fights. The conversation did get a bit disjointed – he spoke English very well but it went from his plans to go to Barcelona or Madrid to who was the prime minister of canada, whose name he wrote down. I got the impression he was a writer but couldn’t find people with good enough English to review his work. He let me take his picture but didn’t want it out on social media so i am respectingvthat. Ken noticed he had 2 different shoes. At any rate, we gave him all of our fruit, some chocolate, both hard boiled eggs and half our baguette, which he immediately devoured. Good luck and good way, sir. I think you will need it.

This is the Basque cross or “lauburu”. It is an ancient swastika, not to be confused woth the Nazi one. We see it everywhere, especially on their souvenirs.

And now we go down again.

Funeral stone.

I am going to have nightmares about giant worms.

Ken and I were trying to figure out what this is. Maybe a racing pigeon release?

Poor geese, destined for foie gras.

As soon as they saw me, these sheep panicked and escaped their field and ran across the road. But two got left behind and didn’t know how to get out.  They cried and cried and cried very loudly and non-stop. So loudly that a little old man in a tiny old white car came from the village yo see what the pilgrims had done to his sheep.

Morning glories in November! I want to live here.

He was a stealth dog. They wait in hiding until you are right beside them and then they attack. I wonder how many pilgrims he has given heart attacks to.

Our destination for the night.

Ken and Scott had to stop to look at the truck and noticed the pro-Palestine stickers on the van.

I was expecting a traditional chambre d’hotes but our place for the night was geared for pilgrims. There was an actual real live pilgrim staying there as well – Richard. Only the second we’ve seen since we left Reims two months ago.  Luckily, there were enough rooms that we could all have privacy.  

The place is run by a young guy who walked out of his golf course manager job to open up a pilgrim gite.  We were served excellent sausages (luckily they weren’t the dreaded duck), potatoes roasted in duck fat, and a mixture of cabbage and mushrooms (which I politely declined) – Ken loved it.

And best of all, it came with a dog!

We talked a bit about the homeless man in the chapel. Richard said he talked with him a bit but after a while the man (I would guess early 30s) began talking to himself so Richard left him to it. A dose of other people’s difficult realities superimposed over our glib “will we make it over the next hill” reality.  These encounters remind us of how fortunate we are.