life Archives - Nadine Walks

Surefooted

June 20, 2019

Today as I walked I thought about the word ‘surefooted’. I thought about it as I was descending a small, steep path in the woods that was covered with stones, some of them wet. I had to watch the ground, I had to be careful about where I placed each step, how my foot landed, making sure not to slip or stumble.

All the hiking experience in the world can’t always prevent you from taking a fall, but I do think experience counts for a lot. I’m not so nervous stepping on/over/around rocks anymore. When I first started hiking, before my first Camino, I was slower and shakier. I wasn’t sure where to place my feet, my steps were hesitant.

But sometime in these last years I’ve realized that I’ve become surefooted. I know where to step (most of the time!). But it’s my ease, too, my confidence and competence when I’m hiking. Inside, I can often be full of small worries and concerns, but when I start walking, the worries and concerns seem to quiet down.

Today’s hike required lots and lots of surefooted-ness; the path ran up and down through the woods, on often uneven and muddy ground. The trail was narrow, sometimes hugging the side of a steep slope. Parts were overgrown with thorny branches (wore my long pants- best decision of the day!), sections were covered with thick black slugs, and I nearly stepped on the absolute largest toad I’d ever seen (so maybe that’s not the best example of being surefooted…)

I began to feel tired today, the muscles in my legs started aching, my feet demanded a break. But this is being surefooted, too: knowing when to take a break, knowing that despite the fatigue I’ll be able to carry on.

Now it’s night, I’m alone in the gîte in Borce, I cooked a dinner of spaghetti and tomato sauce, I’m wrapped in blankets in my bunk bed. Inside, again, worries are starting to nag: tomorrow will be a day of steady rain. I have a difficult and long climb up to Somport. What if I’m tired, what if there is no place to stop for a break, what if my feet get soaked and I get blisters?

But then I remember that, when I walk- in the sun or wind or rain, through moorland or meseta or mountains, on pavement or grass or mud- I am surefooted.

So bring on the mountains and the rain, I’m ready.

My Notre-Dame Story

April 20, 2019

I began scrolling back through the photos on my computer to look for Notre-Dame. I knew there were going to be a bunch, but I was almost surprised at how many. Actually, I began laughing when more and more appeared. It seems that I not only spend a lot of time walking by Notre-Dame whenever I’m in Paris, but that I take a few photos each time, too.

Then I dug through my old photo albums, the thick and heavy ones I somehow managed to cart back from France after my junior year abroad. Page by page I searched through the photos and it seems that this habit is nothing new; it appears that I took a photo nearly every time I passed by Notre-Dame back then, too.

I might have 100 photos of the cathedral from at least a dozen trips to Paris, between the years 2000 to 2019.

Readers here have probably noticed how much I love Paris, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned that it all starts with Notre-Dame.

When it was time to pick a language in 7th grade, I listed French as my first choice, and I got into the class. I can’t remember exactly why I wanted to learn French, and not Spanish or German, only that I was certain that it was my top choice. I remember that hanging on the wall in the classroom was a poster of Notre-Dame, and sometimes during class I’d stare at it. In fact, that poster might have been the best thing about 7th (and 8th) grade French class; learning French was hard. Really hard.

But I continued with it through three years of high school, quitting after my junior year and vowing that I’d never study the language again. I’d put in my time, I’d tried, but understanding French eluded me.

What did pique my interest in those days was art and art history. I took drawing and painting and photography and I wasn’t very good at any of them (I think I got better at photography later), but I realized that one of my favorite parts of art class were the days when we had art history lessons. During my junior year I also took a Humanities course, and I chose to write about Notre-Dame for one of our papers (I also got to ponder the meaning of life through a paper on Siddhartha, analyzed the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby, and delivered a persuasive speech from the point of view of Scarlett O’Hara. That was a great class).

When I got to college I had to take one language class, and I tested into an intermediate level French course. Recalling my middle school and high school misery, I poured every bit of effort I had into that class, not wanting French to be the downfall of my college years.

It’d be nice to say that all my effort paid off and I could finally understanding French, but that’s not exactly what happened. The effort did pay off in that it gained the appreciation of my professor, a notoriously tough instructor who either loved you or hated you, and graded accordingly. She decided she loved me, and all but forced me to apply to spend my junior year studying in Toulouse, France. (This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I remember parts of our conversation about my future, and hearing her say, “You do want to see France, don’t you?”)

Spending that year abroad was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It was both wonderful and really tough. Sometimes I hear of my peers’ experiences in study abroad programs around that time, and they often involve tales of communal apartment living and lots of alcohol and late nights and a generally carefree life. My program, on the other hand, was rigorous. The philosophy was for students to become immersed in French culture and life. During that year, I often felt that the expectation was for me to ‘become French’, and I struggled with this quite a bit. I lived with a host family and took third-year level art history courses at a French university, with French students. Even when around my American peers in the program, we were strongly encouraged to speak in French, and our wonderful director could be very stern if he heard us speaking English.

My French wasn’t great when I arrived in Toulouse, and it was a shock to be whisked away by my host family and only understand about a third of what was going on at any given time. Much of the first few months of life in France were like that, and rather than becoming French, I think I spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to be American, and missing my family back home.

But even though these first few months were difficult, there were these amazing moments sprinkled throughout, probably several amazing moments every day that made the challenge worth it. I was living in France, buying baguettes and riding a bike and finding the quickest route into the city center. I was meeting up with my friends and trying different restaurants every night, and learning how to like coffee, and how to tolerate wine. I was learning how to communicate, too, how to understand more and more every day. I was learning how to be part of a different culture.

But more than those smaller moments, it was the promise of Paris that got me through those first two months. As a group we’d taken a few small, local day trips around the region, but the big Paris trip wasn’t until the end of October, nearly two months after we’d arrived in France. I’d been counting down the days, so anxious to just be in Paris. Paris was the reason I’d continued making the effort to learn French, it was the biggest reason I’d decided to study abroad, at the time it was the place I wanted to travel to the most (it’s probably still the place I want to travel to the most, if I’m being honest).

We arrived in Paris after a very turbulent flight, immediately getting on the RER and somehow ending up underground in the Louvre (my memory may be totally wrong here, but I remember taking a tour of the Louvre before even breathing Paris air). The trip was a tightly organized affair, with something scheduled nearly every hour. From the Louvre we went to our hostel and had about 30 minutes until we had to meet downstairs for dinner.

I looked the map I had carefully folded and put in my purse. I saw that our hostel was nearly in the very center of the city, and very, very close to Notre-Dame.

“Does anyone want to go out real quick and find Notre-Dame?” I was sharing the hostel room with 5 of my friends, and two of them agreed to come with me.

We went outside and for the one of the first times in France, I felt giddy, and free. We bent our heads over our maps and wound through the streets and headed over a bridge and one of my friends said, “I can see part of the cathedral!”

I put my head down, covered my eyes, and my friends grabbed onto my arms. “We’ll tell you when to look up!” they said.

We stopped walking, they gave me the signal, and I raised my head.

We were standing at the back of Notre-Dame, the part of the cathedral that had long fascinated me: those flying buttresses and the small round windows, all underneath a wooden roof and an impossibly tall spire.

I looked at Notre-Dame and immediately spun around. It was so beautiful that I had to look away.

I have felt that way every single time I see the cathedral. When I arrive in Paris, I often stay in the same hostel that our group stayed in on that first trip to Paris. I walk the same route to the Île Saint-Louis, I put my head down when the spire first appears, and then raise my head to take it in all at once. It is almost always the first thing I do when I’m in the city, and I don’t feel like I’m in Paris until I’ve seen Notre-Dame.

On that first trip, Notre-Dame gave me something. It gave me peace and comfort, and more than anything, a feeling that I belonged. That I belonged there, standing underneath the buttresses. That I belonged there, in Paris. That I belonged there, an American in France. Notre-Dame belongs to so many people, and it also belongs to me. I’ve always felt that it’s my special place in this world, a place that I can always go back to.

Last summer, I had a picnic along the Seine with three of my La Muse friends, and we chose a spot not far from Notre-Dame. We sat and laughed and ate and drank, and I remember sitting back as the sun set, thinking, “I can always come back here. Notre-Dame will always be here.” I took a silly picture, a selfie, angling the camera so that a blurry Notre-Dame was just visible in the background. I wanted to remember the pure joy of that moment: a picnic with friends along the Seine, underneath a setting sun, Notre-Dame looming in the background, reminding me that it would always be there for me.

I was in Paris in February, just for a long-weekend trip. I’d found a cheap flight and I remembered what I had told myself the year before, and perhaps every year since I first went to Paris in 2000. “It’s there, waiting for you.” I wasn’t staying in my hostel this time, but in an Airbnb apartment in the 12th arrondissement, the furthest from the center I’d ever stayed. It was strange, arriving in Paris to a place I wasn’t familiar with. Arriving and not seeing Notre-Dame right away.

But after settling into my room I set back out, walking block after block, the Seine on my left, the Bastille on my right. I passed through the Marais, walked down the street past my hostel, over the bridge and onto the Île Saint-Louis and there was Notre-Dame, lit up by the setting sun. I was late to meet my friend, because I couldn’t pull myself away. That golden light, that beautiful cathedral, right where I’d left it.

When I heard, on Monday, that it was burning and that the spire had fallen, I was sitting on an outdoor deck of a restaurant in Key Largo with my sister. I’m pretty sure I made a scene. I felt frantic: scrolling through my phone, texting and messaging people, reading the news. Inside, in the bar, we watched a television broadcast that showed the cathedral on fire. I had to walk away, to be present with where I was and who I was with, but there was a pit in my stomach all day long. I felt like I was holding my breath. And it wasn’t until I learned that much of the cathedral had been saved that I felt like I could exhale.

It’s still there. It’s different, it’s not what it used to be, it’s not whole. But it’s still there.

I had to write about Notre-Dame, if only to share some part of what it means to me, to add my own story to all the others. It’s about what is lost, about art and history and religion and faith and the story of a nation, but it’s in the individual stories, too. Notre-Dame is the center of Paris, but in some ways, it’s my own center, my center when I’m on my own and out in the world, totally unsure of myself, trying to find my place.

Notre-Dame became my place.

Day 9 on the Pennine Way; Tan Hill Inn to Holwick, 20+ miles

March 25, 2019

Day 9 on the Pennine Way started with another full English breakfast in the dining room of the Tan Hill Inn. Actually, it started with something better.

Have I mentioned my little trick when it comes to breakfasting on the Pennine Way? When I stayed in a bunkhouse or B&B that served breakfast, I’d make a note of the starting time and always arrived at least 5 minutes early. Often I was the first one there, and the tables were set and the cooks were in the kitchen. Within moments I’d have a hot cup of coffee and my breakfast ordered placed, the food being cooked up quickly. I could have a good but fast breakfast and be out the door before others had even tucked into their eggs.

But on this morning, in Tan Hill, I experienced a little coffee magic. The owner or manager of the Inn, who I’d seen milling around the night before, came over to my table.

“Good morning,” he smiled at me. “Coffee, or tea, or…, ” he paused. “Maybe a cappuccino?”

Now I’m not sure if I got the cappuccino offer was because I was early, or because he offers cappuccinos to everyone (I didn’t hear him offer one to anyone else, but I could have been mistaken), or who knows, maybe he was being extra friendly and trying to flirt by offering me good coffee (and if so, he was on the right track).

In any case, you better believe I ordered the cappuccino and the coffee was strong and milky and GOOD. I think I said this in my last post but I’ll repeat it one more time here- if you’re planning a walk on the Pennine Way and are interested in staying in the Tan Hill Inn (Britain’s highest pub and all-around cool and isolated place), consider booking a bed in one of the bunk rooms. I lucked out and had the room to myself, but even if you have to share it’s a good deal. The beds are basic but comfortable, you get a towel (a towel!) and use of a bathroom with a shower and a tub. Breakfast is included in the price and if you’re lucky and smile at the cute owner, you might just get yourself a cappuccino too.

But back to business, I had walking to do. I finished breakfast, laced up my shoes, and headed back out into the wide open countryside.

As usual, it was another blue sky day with full sunshine. The walk out of Tan Hill through Sleightholme Moor can be boggy (and probably IS boggy 99% of the time), but aside from a couple slightly wet sections, the walking was dry and not too difficult. In foggy conditions I imagine it would be really difficult to follow the path; even on a clear day, it was hard to keep track of the faint trace of a path through the tall grass. My guidebook recommended keeping an eye out for the white posts that dotted the landscape, and this is how I followed the path out of Tan Hill: scanning the open field for a marker somewhere far in the distance and when I found it, I’d head there, then start scanning for another.

The walking went on and on, and I remember it being mostly pleasant and not too strenuous. After a few hours I reached a milestone: I was halfway through the Pennine Way! Just a little past the halfway point I stopped by a small hut; there aren’t a lot of these on the route, but when the weather is bad I can imagine that being able to stop and rest and get out of the rain would be most welcome. I only stayed for a few minutes, taking time to read some of the notes left on the walls. The one pictured below caught my eye; what an incredible way to honor a 50th birthday! And those words- “Enjoy the freedom”- echoed in my head as I continued to walk and walk down the trail. The freedom to walk under trees and through meadows and along the reservoirs, the freedom to kick off my shoes or drink deeply from my bottle of water, the freedom to walk as fast or as slow as I wanted or needed.

7 more miles to go, and on tired but content legs I walked into the very charming village of Middleton-in-Teesdale. I wouldn’t be staying here; my reservation was in a bunkhouse another 3-miles down the path, but I stopped in the village to look around and buy some snacks for the next day.

I was feeling happy. It had been an all-around good day on the Pennine Way. The sun was shining and I was smiling and even though I was tired, I felt good as I walked away from the village and onwards to my bunkhouse.

Everything was going fine as I continued to congratulate myself on a walk well done when, all at once, things took a turn.

My reservation was for Low Way Farm Camping Barn, and my guidebook’s very basic, hand-drawn map showed the location of the barn to be in the middle of a field. There was a faint, dotted line on the map, veering off from the Pennine Way and straight towards the camping barn and so I assumed I would be looking for some sort of path. I walked up, I walked down, I walked back and I walked forth, over the same stiles and stone steps and through the same gates several times. I could see a few buildings in the field, so I headed towards one, making my own path through the tall and rough grass.

I arrived at the first stone building, circled around it a few times, peered in windows and shook on the locked doors. There was no one around and there didn’t seem to be much going on in the building, either, but I thought that perhaps this could be my camping barn. I wasn’t sure. I scratched my head, considered the expanse of green field, and continued walking. Back to the the path of the Pennine Way, up and down and back and forth, through the fields again to try another building, with no luck.

So then I set off further into the fields, attempting to reach a road that was running parallel to the Pennine Way. I went up and over hills, to climb over fences I had to navigate around barbed wire, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going but I could hear an occasional car drive by so I knew I was close to the road.

And once I arrived at the road, I easily found the pub where I planned to have dinner later that night. It’s not that I’d been lost at any point, it’s just that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where my camping barn was! I headed towards the pub to ask for help but before I could get inside, a white van pulled up beside me, the window rolling down.

“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice called out. “You’re not Nadine, are you?”

This was the owner of the camping barn, and she’d come to find me. I suspect that a farmer must have seen me wandering cluelessly around the fields and sent out the SOS on my behalf. Who knows. I was just grateful to have a key in my hand and easy directions to my accommodations. I followed a gravel path and arrived at one of the stone buildings I’d been convinced couldn’t have been the camping barn. From outside the building I could look across the field and see exactly where I’d been traipsing up and down, hopelessly confused. I think my wanderings cost me nearly 2 additional hours of walking- you should have seen the things that came out of my shoes! The owner of the barn had warned me that the pub might stop serving food around 7:30, so I showered as fast as I could and then raced back out again: up the gravel path, over the hill, down the road where I arrived, breathlessly, at the pub.

I checked the time on my phone. 7:18pm. “Perfect,” I breathed to myself. I went inside, up to the bar, and was promptly informed that the kitchen had stopped serving food.

I’m not sure what I said, though I probably asked if they were sure that no food was being served. I didn’t want to beg but I certainly pleaded, explaining that I was walking the Pennine Way and that it had been a very long day. The woman behind the bar didn’t seem to care, she just shrugged and said I could order a beer.

I sat at a table, watched as another couple were served heaping plates of hot and delicious-looking food, drank my beer quickly and then headed back out: down the road, onto the gravel path, over the little hill, past the sheep in the field, into my camping barn.

How many miles did I end up walking that day? A lot. Over 20. I was alone in the camping barn, and feeling very alone in general that night. I opened my pack of emergency quinoa, tore off a hunk of bread that was supposed to be breakfast the next morning, and sat glumly on a bench, eating my simple dinner.

I had enough food, I’d found where I needed to be, I had a bed to sleep in and my body was tired but feeling fine. All of this was true, all of it was important, but I still felt kind of defeated.

But the light in the fields was golden, and little sheep wandered up to my door, sometimes peering inside. I still had a couple ginger cookies left and so I ate them and read more of Jane Eyre, I read in the dimming light until I could no longer see the words on the page.

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Still walking, still writing

November 6, 2018

Could this be the longest time since the start of this blog that I’ve gone without posting??

Maybe. My last post was in August, where I was walking through the sunshine on my second day on the Pennine Way. I walked from June 20th-July 4th and in the last four months I’ve only managed to write about two days of the walk… yikes!

So with all of this silence it might be a fair question I’m about to ask: is anyone still out there?

Oh, I sure hope so. The blog may be a little silent but I haven’t gone anywhere. In fact, lately, I’ve felt pretty locked into my writing, it just hasn’t been here. I’ve had ideas for the blog, and a dozen posts are half written (well, all in my head), and I want to write a few more guides, and more e-books too, and… there’s so much!

But right now, my energy is somewhere else, it’s with my book. I’ve mentioned it before, and maybe you remember: I’ve been working on a memoir that tells the story of my first long walk on the Camino de Santiago. There’s still so much work to be done but I think that- just maybe- it is starting to come together. And that’s been so exciting! Really, really exciting!

I’ve missed this blog though, I’ve missed writing about my walking adventures and even just the general thoughts on life. And I miss all of you, too, the small interactions we have here… or maybe even just knowing that my words are going out to some unknown place, read by some unknown people. And that the act of publishing something here, anything here, is important.

I’m back for now, with this little post that is mostly to say hi, and to share some of the beautiful fall scenes around my neighborhood and local park (this has been one of the most beautiful fall seasons in recent memory!).

I also wanted to give a few updates, just about things I’ve been meaning to share or things I’m thinking about, so here we go:

1. Anyone here on Instagram and not following my page, Nadine Walks? Well, come on over! I’m still consistently posting a photo just about every day from my walks, and right now I’m in the middle of photos from the Pennine Way. Sometimes I write a longish caption that captures some little detail or story from the day, it’s kind of like mini-blogging (which means that I’m missing writing about my walks here! I need to get back into it!!).

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2. I’ve been home from my summer travels for over two months, and so far all I’ve mentioned here on the blog is that I walked for 15 days on the Pennine Way. But did you know that in August, after my four weeks at my writer’s retreat, I hopped back on Le Puy to walk for three days through France?? It was a whirlwind baby-Camino but I loved it. It was all I could fit in but it was worth it. Camino time, even just a bit of it, warms my soul. I’ll write about that sometime, too.

3. Speaking of the Camino, last month I read Beth Jusino’s recently published book, Walking to the End of the World. I’d been following Beth’s blog and her adventures on the Camino for some time, and was delighted to be able to read about her journey more fully in her book. The unique spin of this particular Camino story is that she (and her husband) walk not just the 500-miles of the Camino Frances, but they start in Le Puy and all told, walk 1,000 miles! Since I’ve walked a little over half of the Le Puy route myself, it was such a joy to hear more about that part of her Camino experience.

4. I’m thinking about starting up a Patreon page, and this feels both scary and exciting. Here’s a link to a great little video explaining what Patreon is; basically, it’s a way for an audience to help support the artists they follow. It’s hard for me to ask for help, so this is a big step for me, but I think it’s an important one. So far, I haven’t been earning any money from the work that I’m creating, and that’s been more than okay. I’ll keep writing and taking photographs, regardless of money or audience. But as I think about where I want to take my writing, I realize that I need to look into different ways that I can support myself. Maybe this Patreon thing won’t translate to much, maybe it will be a couple bucks a month that can cover coffee costs on my walks (or, even more realistically, the fees it takes to run this blog), but I think I’m going to try it. More on this soon.

Okay, time to go. It’s a very gray, rainy fall day over in my neck of the woods; we are just past peak foliage and some leaves are still clinging to the trees, stubbornly refusing to come down despite the rain and the wind of the last few days. Hanging on for just a little longer, as if to say, “Winter may be coming, but not quite yet.” If the rain would ever stop maybe I could run outside for a quick, late afternoon walk. If only. But instead, I think it could be nice to light a candle in the darkening of the room, pour a glass of good red wine, and hunker down to work on my book.

Thanks for still being here, and I’ll write again soon.

Day Two on the Pennine Way: Torside to Standedge, 12 miles

August 17, 2018

My second day on the Pennine Way, compared to the first, was glorious. And oh man, did I need it!

The sun was shining brightly and the report at breakfast was that the weather should be clear for the next week, at least. And breakfast, for the record, was also glorious: my first full English of the trip. A bowl of cereal, two sausage links, scrambled eggs, a thick slice of ham, tomatoes and mushrooms and baked beans and toast and juice and coffee. It was delicious and also too much but I ate as much as I could and then ordered a packed lunch to carry with me.

Sitting at the next table was Margaret, also from California, and she told me how she had also gotten lost the day before, by walking along Kinder River. “Those footprints you saw were probably mine!” she said. It never occurred to me that I might have been following someone who had also gotten lost.

Margaret was staying two nights in The Old House B&B, and taking advantage of their transport service, so she had already walked the second day and would be driven to a point about 15 miles further on. She told me and David about a shortcut around one of the reservoirs, and our B&B host confirmed it, and I was careful to make a note in my guidebook. We were directed to the best way to get back to the path from the B&B, and so I hoisted my pack and set off across the neighboring field.

Within just five minutes, I was walking back to the B&B to ask for clarification. I’d been wandering around the field rather aimlessly and feeling kind of silly and honestly, I think I had lost a little confidence the day before, when I’d made several big navigational mistakes. My B&B host once again pointed me in the right direction, and finally I was on my way.

The day’s walk was just beautiful. There were some challenging sections, mostly in the first four miles which climbed and climbed up to Black Hill, but even that part wasn’t so bad. The sky was clear blue with huge fluffy clouds and for awhile there were sheep at every turn. I hadn’t yet grown used to the sheep (spoiler: I would pass hundreds and hundreds of sheep nearly every day of the walk), and it was so amusing to approach and see how close I could get before they would spook and run a few feet away.

And as I climbed up towards Laddow Rocks I was totally alone, and the views stretched out behind me, wide and vast. My legs, despite the strain of the day before, felt good, and I was happy and energized and excited for what was ahead.

One of the most beautiful moments of the day (and maybe of the entire trip) was when I turned off the road towards Wessenden Head Reservoir. There was a great slope of green hill that stretched down from the top of the path, and sitting at the top of the hill was an older woman on a wooden kitchen chair. Darting and racing all around the field in front of her were at least a dozen dogs, maybe more. They were all shapes and sizes and colors, and there were two women amongst them, who seemed to be their handlers. I still haven’t figure out what, exactly, they were doing or where they were from: one of the women would occasionally throw a ball and the dogs were run after it, or sometimes when one might begin to stray too far the other woman would call him back. I watched the dogs for a few minutes and then the woman in the chair began to talk to me. She told me that she had very recently found out that she had cancer, and by some coincidence she had discovered these women with the dogs on Facebook, and they invited her out to this hillside.

She sat there, with a blanket wrapped tightly around her legs, the sun on her face and a dozen dogs racing at her feet. “I think this must be some version of heaven,” she said.

A little further down the path- after I ate my sandwich on a rock in the sunshine- I attempted the shortcut that our B&B hosts and Margaret had told me about. I studied my map, I made a left at the end of a reservoir, I followed the path and I had no idea what went wrong! I reached what I thought was the end of the path and I couldn’t figure out a way to go forward, so I gave up and retraced my steps (it was around this point that I began wondering just how many miles I was adding on to this whole Pennine Way thing). Just when I got back to where I had attempted the shortcut, I ran into Nigel and Judy, the friendly couple who had shared a taxi with me on the way to Edale.

Shortcut on the Pennine Way, Wessenden Reservoir

Shortcut gone wrong!

We ended up walking together or close to each other for the last few miles of the day, and despite my failure with the first shortcut, we ended up taking another when a very friendly local man explained the best way to get to our lodgings in Standedge. This time- finally- I figured out the right path.

My lodging for the night was a campsite around the back of The Carriage House in Standedge. I’d brought my tent and some camping supplies with me because there were a couple nights along the way where I couldn’t find a bed in a B&B or a hostel or bunkhouse. I also figured that if my plans needed to change or I ran into any trouble, having a tent with me would allow for some extra insurance.

But camping is still a relatively new thing for me; I’ve been car camping only a couple of times, and really, the only thing that gave me any sort of confidence to attempt camping along the Pennine Way was the three nights I spent in my tent on Cumberland Island several years before.

Before I left for my trip, I meant to practice setting up my tent- and I did, just one time. But when I unfurled everything from my pack on the grassy lawn of The Carriage House, the material looked alien and the color coded tabs indecipherable. I flipped the tent and the footprint and the rain cover around a few times and weaved the poles together and clipped things here and there and, eventually, I had something that looked like a standing tent. I realized that I could have used one more stake, and I wasn’t sure if I’d used the stakes that I did have in the correct way; with the first strong gust of wind, I worried that the tent was going to be flapping around too much.

I stood back, with my hands on my hips, and surveyed my work. Good enough. I walked around the side of The Carriage House to find the shower blocks so I could clean up, and then I went inside for a glass of wine. Later, I met up with David and we ate dinner together, and then around 9pm I somewhat reluctantly went outside to see about sleeping in the tent. Once the sun went down the temperatures dropped and I put on every layer of clothing I had in my pack and tucked myself deep in my sleeping bag. But I was cold, and stayed cold all through the night- tossing and turning and trying my hardest to sleep. I think I finally got comfortable around 5am once the sun started to rise and the tent began to warm back up. A little late for a good night’s sleep, but it was enough. Mostly, I was relieved that my first night of camping was over, and I let my tent out in the sun so the dew could dry while I went inside and had another full English breakfast.

Ready for Day 3!!

Previous Post: Day 1 on the Pennine Way

Next Post: Day 3 on the Pennine Way

Day One of the Pennine Way: Edale to Torside, 15 miles (that somehow turned into 20)

August 13, 2018

I woke up at 4:30am, and then again at 5:30am. The sun was shining bright in the sky and it felt impossible to fall back to sleep. I was alone in my bunk room and the air was cool outside the open window, and when I looked out I could see clouds in the distance.

I put on my hiking outfit and rolled up my sleeping bag and began to remember how to arrange my backpack. I was moving slowly. Breakfast was a coffee sachet and a banana and a granola bar, and by 7:00 I was dressed and packed and ready to start my long walk.

The Pennine Way starts in the small village of Edale, a 45-minute drive east from Manchester, and the track immediately heads into farmland and open countryside. As I was halfway up the first (very) small hill I began to breathe heavily and it felt as though I was being pulled backwards, as though there were two hands on my backpack gently tugging, and tugging. My pack was heavy, heavier than anything I’d walked with ever before. Only 15 minutes into the walk, I began to worry that because of the weight I was carrying (a weight that included camping supplies), this walk might be a bit of a challenge.

And the first real challenge of the day was Jacob’s Ladder, a series of steep steps that climb and climb and climb, dropping you off at Edale Rocks. Step by step, inch by inch, I made it to the top and as soon as I did I felt my first raindrop. And then more, and more, so I took off my pack and pulled out my raincoat and then kept walking. The rain, at first, didn’t seem so bad, but within minutes I was walking through thick clouds, rain pelting me from every angle, the wind blowing fiercely so that no part of me was left dry. My hiking pants quickly became wet and cold against my legs and I was only an hour into the day’s walk. I found the best cover I could, and I huddled under the overhang of a rock and took off my pants and changed into my long underwear and rain pants, much like I did that time when I walked Hadrian’s Wall. “Already prancing around the Pennine Way in my underwear”, I thought.

My guidebook says this about the first day: “The Pennine Way throws you straight in at the deep end. If the weather is poor, it may also test your navigation and equipment as you skirt around the notorious Kinder Scout and ascend the remote summit of Bleaklow.”

Ahh, truer words were never spoken! The Pennine Way certainly did test my navigation skills (or lack thereof) on that first day; as I crossed Kinder Scout and made my way across what felt like the ridge of a mountain (though honestly I had no idea because I couldn’t see a thing), I focused so carefully on the faint path at my feet. The trail wound in and out of large rocks and sometimes it was really difficult to tell where I needed to go. Visibility was also extremely poor, but for awhile I managed to follow the path.

Here might be a good time to say something about the signage on the Pennine Way: well, there could be more of it. There were many, many times along the trail where it seemed as though the path divided and there was no clear indication of which way to go. I quickly learned that I needed to follow my guidebook closely, and by doing so I always figured out the way. But on that first day, when it started raining, I hadn’t wanted to take off my pack and dig through and get everything wet looking for my guide, so I foolishly thought I could just follow the path without much trouble.

Well, the first trouble came at Kinder Downfall. I was suppose to cross over the river which is mostly dry unless there’s been really heavy rain, and it involved a rather sharp left turn. It had been a long time since I’d checked my guidebook and I was oblivious to the fact that I needed to cross a river or make a left, and I assumed that a signpost would indicate where I needed to go. The other complicating factor was that I just couldn’t see a thing. There should have been sweeping views, and a rocky cliff face, and I should have been able to see a path on the other side of the river bed. Instead, all I could see was the trace of a path at my feet, and I just continued to follow it straight on.

Straight and straight and straight, along a mostly dry river bed. For a long time I didn’t even question whether I was still on the Pennine Way or not; I was on a path, there were footprints in the mud which meant that others had come before me, and there were even a few cairns- those large pile of rocks which, to me, mean that I’m on the right path.

How long did I walk? A mile? Two? Eventually, the path faded into obscurity, and suddenly there were half a dozen different directions I could walk in. I tried a few of them, I tried to see a way forward, I turned around and around looking for something, for someone, but there was nothing.

So I turned around, because it was all I could do. I knew that if I retraced my steps I would eventually get back to what I knew was the Pennine Way, and so I walked back, for one mile or maybe even two, and I found a cairn that I knew was on the path and I took out my guidebook and luckily there was a break in the rain and I sat and I thought and I thought. I noticed that I needed to cross the river, but with visibility still being so poor, I couldn’t quite figure out where I was supposed to go.

And then, emerging from the fog and the mist, was a man wearing a black raincoat. I could see him in the distance, slowly moving closer, and I sat and waited until he was nearly upon me and then I said, “Are you on the Pennine Way?”

His name was David, from LA by way of Liverpool, and he took out his own guide and we studied the maps and together figured out where we needed to turn. By even more great luck there were two men coming from the other direction and they were able to point out the path to us. I chatted to David for a few minutes and then I continue on ahead of him, grateful and happy that I was finally back on the way.

And then, before long, I made my second mistake of the day. This one was just plan stupidity and lack of focus; I was tired and wet and worried that the path was much more difficult to navigate than I’d expected, and I turned too soon and headed down a very steep, very large hill, so confident that I was going the right way until suddenly it was clear that I wasn’t. I turned around, I looked up and up at what I would have to climb. This was actually one of the hardest moments of my entire walk- that feeling of knowing you’ve already walked so long and so far, of feeling wet and cold, of knowing you still have so far to go, and then looking at this really steep hill and knowing that you need to retrace some very difficult steps.

One by one, I did it. I got back to the top and ate half my sandwich and changed my socks and then kept walking. The rain started again, and then didn’t stop for the next two or three hours. Wet and cold, wet and cold, I rummaged through my pack until I found my buff and I wrapped my numbed fingers in it like a muff, as best as I could.

The last few miles of the day followed Clough’s Edge, a high and narrow path through ferns, before a very steep descent down to Torside. The entire time I was so worried that I was on the wrong path, because it felt like it had been hours since I’d seen a sign for the Pennine Way. Maybe it had been hours. My legs were so tired and the path was so steep that I had to watch my footing carefully. Finally, finally, just as the skies began to clear, I reached the bottom of the descent and saw a sign and knew that I was close to my destination. The sun burst from behind the clouds, warming my face for the first time all day. I was exhausted, but I had made it.

I had a room at The Old House B&B reserved for the night, and I was grateful for it. A clean towel and a bar of soap were laid out on the bed, the shower was hot, and there were supplies for making tea in the kitchen. There are no dinner options at the B&B or anywhere nearby, but the hosts of The Old House offer to drive guests to The Peels Arms a few miles away. I went with David- my trail angel from earlier in the day- and we spent our evening talking about rain and gear and our feet and where we were going the next day.

I told him how I was wearing hiking shoes, and not boots, and that I wasn’t concerned about falling or twisting an ankle. “I don’t have the slimmest ankles in the world,” I told him. “Not good for high heels, but great for walking and hiking.”

David held up his beer glass. “To sturdy ankles!”

So this was day one: long and difficult and wet and at times defeating. But in the end, I could feel the sunshine on my face and I had the company of a fellow hiker over a warm meal in a cosy pub, along with a room of my own and a clean towel. This was all the fortification I would need; when I woke up the next morning, I was ready for whatever the day would bring.

Next Post: Day 2 on the Pennine Way

That it Might Last Forever

July 15, 2018

How do I begin to write about my walk on the Pennine Way? I’m at my writer’s retreat in France now; I finished my walk 11 days ago. I’m here to work on other projects, but I know I also want (and need) to write about this walk.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Each walk I do is so different, my experience with it is so different. As I walked the Pennine Way I thought- I don’t need to do this again. It’s beautiful and wonderful but it’s also hard and that hill seemed endless and one time on the Pennine Way is enough.

But yet, I sit here in a small village in France and I wonder who’s out there, hiking the Pennine Way right as this very moment. I think of them with their packs and their walking sticks and I’m envious. I wonder if they have the beautiful weather that I had. If the bogs are still mostly dry. If the heather has turned purple.

I jotted down some words, some memories this morning, and I think this is as good a place as any to begin. I’ll blog more- surely- about this walk in the weeks and months to come, but for now, here is what the Pennine Way was to me:

It was openness, it was the moors. It was the Brontës. It was walking in the soft morning through the bracken. It was reading chapters of Jane Eyre and eating thin ginger biscuits in empty bunkhouses.

It was a cappuccino from the good looking owner of the highest pub in Britain. It was a Greek meal and a glass of good wine on a terrace with a girl from Norfolk. And fish and chips in a pub with a man from LA by way of Liverpool and talking about Meatloaf and toasting to sturdy ankles (mine).

It was the full English breakfast.

Half pints turned into pints, and restaurants that stopped serving food in the early evening and cold quinoa from a bag and a loaf of bread.

Rescuing a lamb stuck in a fence, retreating from a field of bulls and being helped over a high stone wall by a man running a race.

It was entire days of walking alone, it was struggling over the stiles and figuring out the locks on gates. Taking the shortcuts. Missing the shortcuts. Conversations about life and death, and how an endless field with racing dogs and a seat in the sun was probably some version of heaven.

It was hills and mountains with names like Bleaklow and Cross Fell and Kinder Scout and Great Shunner Fell and Pen-y-Ghent and The Schil.

It was not thinking I had the strength to get over these hills, and counting to ten with each step, and repeating this over and over until I reached a top I thought might never come.

It was 268-miles minus the 20 I skipped with a train ride, plus (possibly) an additional 20 I added with wrong turns and mistaken detours.

It was learning not to follow what I thought was a path along Kinder River.

A pack that started heavy and grew heavier, and learning how to shoulder that weight. Four blisters and aching feet, sunburn on the tips of my ears and a fall into the soft grass that startled all of the sheep.

Walking through a heat wave and discussing the weather with everyone I met.

Nights in a tent wrapped in a borrowed sweater, wind that pushed me sideways, air and a sky that made me feel alive. Dry and prickly heather weeks away from its bloom, puffy white flowers growing from the bogs, a deer bounding along train tracks, and the constant scattering of hundreds of sheep.

Tarns and burns and crags and fells and becks. The moors and the mountains. My stride, sometimes slow, sometimes fluid, as I moved through this landscape.

A small tub of Wensleydale ice cream on a bench in the shade. An apple on a rock in the sun. A muffin and a cold coffee drink in the middle of the heather when I thought I couldn’t walk any further. So many rounds of Babybel cheese and flour tortillas.

A clear blue sky nearly every morning. Horse flies and honesty boxes and bad coffee. Duckboards and slabs. Signposts with a white acorn.

And: standing alone at the top of a great expanse and feeling as though this might go on and on, and that it might last forever.

No Room at the Inn! Small Shoes!

May 15, 2018

Minutes ago, in a flurry of excitement and anticipation, I dug through my drawers and cabinets, assembled clothing and toiletries and trinkets, and put it all together in my old Camino pack.

“Off on an adventure!” you might be thinking. “Where is she headed to?” you might be asking.

These are fine observations and questions but the answer is: Nowhere. Not yet.

But then why am I loading up my Camino pack? All I can really tell you is that I feel as though my summer trip is right around the corner. Today was just a Tuesday in the middle of May but it felt like one of those days that immediately precedes a big adventure. The air was heavy and humid and hot, the trees were bursting with green, I had off from work and so it felt like the normal pace of the last 9 months was pulling to a close. School’s out, summer’s here.

Not yet, not yet, I still have a month to go. One month! But just one month, and maybe that’s why I can practically taste my next journey. I’m in those final weeks where it feels like time just slips away so quickly, when there is still so much left to do, when every day I need to look at the great big list I’ve made for myself and try to manage to check at least one thing off.

And today, I let the excitement wash over me. My first stop on my summer trip will be the Pennine Way, a 268-mile route through the mountains and hillsides that are said to make up the backbone of England. I paged through my guidebook and began to re-read the blogs that had been part of my research months ago.

Along with the excitement was a sudden burst of nerves, the kind that always hit me, but this time they feel early. There’s still so much I need to do, but I have nearly 5 weeks and haven’t I already done this sort of thing before? Many times before?

Yes, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying. This route will be challenging, and the first days start off with a bang and I just haven’t been hiking like I normally do at this time of year. And this isn’t Spain, this is England- northern England- and what if it rains every day? What if the June days are unseasonably cool? What if I get turned around and stuck in a bog?

The blogs warn of stream crossings that can swell if there’s been rain, and now I think to myself, “I need to pack my Crocs, too.” The blogs also warn of the heavy mist that can obscure the way, and I worry at this as well. When I’m walking, I tend to have a good sense of direction and have really never gotten lost, or strayed far from the path. But what if the Pennine Way is different than the West Highland Way, or Hadrian’s Wall Path? What if I am, actually, vastly underprepared?

Now is probably the time when one of you should write in and tell me to stop over-thinking this, and you’d be right to do so. This walk may indeed be my most challenging yet, but I’ve also read many accounts that say the way-marking is better than ever, and that big stone slabs have been laid down over the boggiest portions of the trail. These things assure me.

Usually by now I’ve checked in with some updates on my planning, so here we go…

The planning has been intense!!

On a Camino, you really don’t need to do much planning, outside of your flight, your train/bus/taxi to the start of the walk, and maybe the first night’s accommodation. But walks in the UK are a little different, at least for a non-camper like me. Since I’ll be staying in a mix of B&B’s, hostels and bunkhouses, I need to make sure they I have my beds reserved. Because I’m not going to carry a tent, it would be a little risky to just show up and expect to find a place to sleep. And on the Pennine Way, there are sometimes great distances between towns or villages, so if one place is all booked up, I might be unable to walk the distance to the next.

I pre-booked my lodgings for both the West Highland Way and Hadrian’s Wall Path, but each of those walks were only 5 days long. I’ll walk the Pennine Way in 15 days, and including a night before my start and an extra night in Scotland at the end, I’ve had to research and book 17 different places! I knew this going in, but the organization and communication and details were another thing altogether once I’d started.

I’ve run into a little trouble here, and I’m not out of the woods yet. There are a couple places along the route where accommodation seems- already- to be all booked up. I’m not sure how this is possible; my guidebook talks of all the lodging options in one particular town along the route, and says, “Unless the Rolling Stones decide to play in Middleton Village Hall, there is always going to be plenty of choice.” Well, I looked into every single option in my guidebook, then scoured other options online, and everything is booked. I literally checked to see if the Rolling Stones were going to be in town (had to do it!), and I can’t find any reason that there is no accommodation available. And this has happened at multiple different towns or villages along the route, where I’d been planning to stay. So far I think I’ve figured out most of my nights, and have had to alter my route a bit, but it isn’t all bad. One of the changes I’ve had to make now has me stopping in Haworth, home to the Brontës, a stop that I thought I would have to miss. It does mean that the day out of Haworth will come in at a whopping 26-miles, but, well, I’ll deal with that when I get there.

But there are still a couple nights’ lodging that I need to figure out, and and another curveball has been how to figure out the best way to make a quick phone call over to England from the States. I won’t go into the details here, but it took me far too long to come up with a good solution (but I think I have the solution- Viber Out. I got through to one of the hostels this morning, so something must have worked?).

The other snafu to my summer adventuring has been the shoes. Oh, the shoes! Something I thought I had figured out 4 years ago, when I bought that first pair of Keen Voyageurs and have been singing their praises ever since. Well, maybe I have spoken too soon, or maybe I have jinxed myself, or maybe this is just what companies do: they constantly change things up because they think they need to be bigger or better. But when it comes to shoes that fit wide feet, oh please, leave good enough alone!

I bought my new pair of Keens and giddily took a photo of all the old pairs and this new one and thought to myself, “How lucky I am to have a shoe that fits.” But then I wore them for a few walks around my neighborhood, and then on a 6-mile hike, and I don’t think there’s any way that I can take them to England for the Pennine Way. The shoes have changed; I’d heard rumors of this a few months ago, but this new pair I bought confirmed it for me. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but the shoe feels a little shorter and my toes feel crowded. I think the width is still there, so maybe it’s the length? But my toes hurt in a way that they never have before, and that was just after a 6-mile hike.

In any case, I’m at a loss for what to do. I’m running out of time so I need to figure out something quickly: either buy a half size larger and hope they work, or maybe try a different model altogether. I stopped by REI last weekend to see if I could try the Voyageurs on, but they are no longer being sold in the store. Someone working there said they thought that a new model of the Targhee is actually the same thing as the Voyageur, just with a different look (does this make any sense??). I tried them on but I wasn’t ready to make a decision- I’m still mourning the loss of my good ol’ Keen Voyageurs.

No room at the Inn and shoes that don’t fit… not exactly good omens for this adventure, huh?

But it’s all part of the fun, isn’t it? This is what travel is: it throws us out of our comfort zones, it makes us need to think on our feet, we need to make adjustments and accept change and sometimes just face the unknown with openness, and trust.

And in the end, I’m going to have shoes on my feet and a bed to sleep in, one way or another. I’m sure my walk through England is going to have some difficult moments, maybe entire days that are challenging, but it’s going to be beautiful and amazing too. History (my own, over these last four summers) has certainly proven that.

(photos from my springtime walks)

Making our choices

April 12, 2018

When I haven’t written in awhile, I like to begin a post with where I am, and what I’m doing. It centers me, it gives me a place to start. It sets the scene.

And while I wish I could be reporting in from some exotic place (or, Europe, which is still quite exotic in my mind), I’m where I usually am at this time of the year. Sitting at my kitchen table, the one that’s covered with a bright yellow table cloth. There’s a dill plant on the table that my mom gave me this past weekend (so if any of you have recipes you love that feature dill, I’d love for you to share them!). Playing on Spotify is Phoebe Bridgers’s album, Stranger in the Alps, and I’m eating some crackers and cheese and drinking a glass of seltzer with lime.

What else can I tell you? It’s 6:15pm and the sun is shining and it’s so nice to have these longer hours of daylight, and the approach of a warm spring. It’s been a slow approach, and not consistently warm yet, but I think those days are right around the corner.

It feels as though so much is right around the corner, and that’s a good feeling. Two weeks ago I took a small trip to the mountains of Virginia, where I hiked and explored and did a little writing and took stock of the first three months of the year. And then I thought about what the focus of the next few months would be about, and all of a sudden it felt like time was moving quickly. Even though work is busy and my days feel full and I can’t wait until I head off to Europe in mid-June, I also want to slow time. Not the days, necessarily, but the years. I want to slow down the years.

Where am I heading with this? I don’t know. Today, a student I work with was telling me how much trouble she’s having about choosing between two colleges. “Why can’t someone just decide for me?” she said.

I looked at her. “Because it’s the first really big decision that you have to make on your own. It’s practice for life, in a way. Because actually, besides loss, I think that’s one of the hardest things about life. You have your one life, and you have to figure out what you’re going to do with it. You’ve got to make decisions about which direction to take and no one does it for you.”

She buried her head on the couch and I heard her muffled voice from under the pillow. “Why if I choose wrong? It’s so hard because I don’t get this time back. And I don’t want to waste it.”

We don’t get time back. Maybe this is one of the hardest things about life, too. I think about this a lot, with where I am in my life, with the things I want to do, with what I want for myself. I want to be doing exactly what I’m doing now: working with kids and living in my beautiful neighborhood and visiting my friends and family and traveling in the summers and writing in the evenings at my kitchen table. And, also, I want to live in a tiny attic apartment in Paris and buy a baguette every day from the corner boulangerie and write a novel. And, also, I want to be married and raise a child and buy a small home somewhere close to the woods and a lake.

And I want to hike the Appalachian Trail (maybe). And I want to see a giant panda in China. And I want to live in Maine. And I want to set up a darkroom and develop pictures and have exhibits in local cafes and galleries. And I want to have dinner parties and children’s birthday parties. And I want a garden. And I want a yard with a magnolia tree.

Sometimes it feels like to chose any one of these things means to give up another. Sometimes I think I have the time to do everything. Sometimes I worry that it’s already too late.

I don’t have much regret with the choices I’ve made so far in my life, but what does sometimes keep me up at night is the thought that my time is so precious. It’s so, so precious. I like what I’m doing and how I’m living but there is always a voice whispering, “And what else? And what else? And when? And when?”

I don’t have any big changes just on the horizon, but I also know that time does not wait for me. I have to make my choices even if it means that one choice might eliminate another. I have to make my choices because one choice might lead to another. I have to make my choices because time marches on, and the years in my one life slide by, and slide by, and slide by.

The years slide by, but to have this time at all is such a gift. What a beautiful thing, to get to make choices in my life. To be free, to have an education, a roof over my head and crackers and cheese on the table before me. To get to choose my direction, to have so many choices.

So, happy spring my friends, here’s to another season, the one that ushers in new life and growth. Let’s make our choices, and see where they take us.

On the Outskirts; Day 7 on the Chemin du Puy, Aubrac to St-Côme-d’Olt, 24km

August 26, 2017

And we’re back on the Chemin du Puy! These blog posts sure are rolling out slowly (is anyone still reading? Wait, forget I asked, because the answer doesn’t really matter; I think I’d probably write out these recaps even if no one read them. I love revisiting my walks!).

But already the Chemin feels awfully long ago, and the details are becoming a little hazy. That became really clear when I started to think about how to write this post, and what to say about Day 7. Sometimes I use my journal entries to trigger memories from the day, but there’s no journal entry for Day 7. I looked at my photos, and while this helped, nothing really jumped out at me. It was a mostly gray day, there were some nice looking trees, and at one point I had a decent view of a town I’d passed through from across the valley.

Not really exciting stuff for a blog post.

Was the walk easy or hard, did I encounter anyone interesting, did I have any conversations, what did I eat? How was my mood- was I feeling energized and happy, or was I feeling a little off and a little slow?

Selfie with pilgrim statue; Chemin du Puy

I met this interesting guy…

I look through the photos again: ah, parts are coming back now. I remember that as I walked into a town, I saw a small rainbow in the sky, and it made me so happy. I had a coffee in that town, too, a café crème and I must have been in a café on the outer edge of town because there were no other pilgrims there, and no one passed by.

Later in the day, I stopped at a small shelter, this little covered space that had a round wooden table filled with the types of things that pilgrims might want in the middle of a long day. A carafe of coffee, a jug of orange juice. There was a register to sign our names, and benches and chairs to rest our feet. Jerome was here, the French man who’d been at our table last night, and again he was smiling and laughing and talking to everyone. There was a group of French women, and then another solo French woman and I said hi but kept pretty quiet. I remember that I’d wanted a break, but also that I felt like being alone.

There’s a small story that goes along with this photo (I told it over on the Instagram account for Nadine Walks, and if you follow that link you can get there and see other photos from my walks). So, I was snapping a few photos of the shelter area when one of the French women motioned for my camera and told me that she was going to take my photo. I didn’t protest, and stood sort of awkwardly by the table. But as soon as the others saw me getting my photo taken, they began to get out of the way. “No!” the French woman called out. “It will look sad if she’s in the photo all alone!” I said something in French, I think I was trying to say that I didn’t want anyone to be bothered or feel like they had to move, but I think what I’d actually said must have been something along the lines of: “Yes, please, I want to be all alone and sad in this photo” because everyone continued to move out and wait until the photo shoot was done so they could move back in.

I’m laughing a little at this now, but I remember at the time feeling frustrated that I couldn’t communicate as well as I wanted to, and just not feeling at ease around the other pilgrims I was meeting that day.

But this has been a pattern over all of these walks, hasn’t it? Some days I know that I want to be alone, and after hours of walking solo, it’s hard for me to readjust and be back around other people.

Speaking of being back with other people, towards the very end of the day I ran into Mario. I saw him from a bit of a distance, sitting with an older man at a table of another little pilgrim rest stop. He was wearing his bright orange shirt- that, along with his dark beard, made me recognize him. I hadn’t seen him since the morning of Day 2, and I assumed that I’d never see him again. He was walking big days, and I imagined that he would have been far ahead at that point.

I hesitated just a moment before going over- I was still feeling a little off and not exactly in the mood to do much talking- but I shook the feeling away and went over with a big smile. To this day, running into friends unexpectedly is one of my very favorite things about the Camino. I think sometimes we are meant to meet people again.

When Mario saw me he sat up with a start, and soon a big smile of his own was covering his face. “I didn’t think I’d see you again!” he said, his voice both happy and a bit incredulous.

It turns out that we’d both booked beds in the same place that night- Gîte L’Antidote. I took a closer look at my guidebook and realized that our Gîte was actually on the outskirts of Saint-Côme-d’Olt, and that I wouldn’t get to stay in the town at all. And once we arrived in the town, I could feel my heart sink a bit. It was such a beautiful place, with winding cobble-stoned roads, charming squares, fountains, the works. I saw Nassim and a few others from the day before and they were all staying in the municipal Gîte, and suddenly I was sad that I wasn’t there, too. I was missing out on a great town, and I worried that- even with Mario- I was going to feel a little isolated at our Gîte on the outskirts.

In the end, it was yet another very different kind of Chemin experience. We had a little trouble finding the Gîte- it was in a residential area and we must have come from the wrong side because we completely missed the signage. And soon I realized it was in a residential area for a reason: we were in someone’s residence. I suppose it was a little like the place where I’d last seen Mario, the Gîte on the outskirts of Saint-Privat-d’Allier, where we stayed in a lofted attic area of someone’s home.

It was a similar thing here; Laurent welcomed us and after nearly an hour sitting outside and drinking syrup water (all I wanted to do was go inside and take a shower but the other two seemed content to sit and talk), we got the tour. He pointed out his son’s room and asked that we not go inside, showed us the bathroom that I can only assume was also used by his family, and then we went upstairs to the attic, where there were 8 beds spread across the room.

It turns out that Mario and I were the only ones staying there that night, and dinner was the two of us plus Laurent and his wife. We were all in our 30’s, sitting around a table outside, eating salad, and stew, and drinking wine and talking and I didn’t feel like I was on the Chemin at all. Or, maybe, it was a different kind of Chemin, maybe it was even more in the spirit of what the Camino used to be like, hundreds of years ago, when pilgrims would knock on a door and hope to find a bed for the night, maybe a little food, too.

But, as usual, I couldn’t appreciate the situation fully because of my French skills. Mario was really good at sometimes translating things for me and making sure I wasn’t totally in the dark about what was going on, but it was still a little frustrating. I wanted to understand everything, I wanted to talk more, I wanted to understand more about these people and why they have opened their home to strangers. I wanted to know more about their son, a three-year old boy with fine hair that curled against his neck, who was running around the yard, shouting and waving his water gun and getting dangerously close to our clothes that were drying on the line.

That night, as Mario and I sprawled on beds on opposite sides of the room, we started air-dropping photos to each other. “Here’s a good one!” Mario said, and ping! A photo of the lake he’d swam in yesterday appeared on my phone. “And here’s a photo of sunrise on the morning when I’d last seen you,” I said, and for the next 20 minutes, photos zinged back and forth across the room. We started laughing- Mario accidentally sent me a photo that I’d sent to him a few minutes earlier, and then we started laughing harder as we realized that our heads were sinking into the plastic covering of our pillows and that it was actually the most uncomfortable thing ever.

We giggled in the dark and all I could think was how strange it is to walk a Chemin, or a Camino. I could walk alone all day and feel a little out of place- the sad girl alone in a photo- but then find myself in the attic of someone’s home in the middle of France, laughing with a new friend, joking like we were children.

So, Day 7 was complete, I was halfway through my adventure on the Chemin du Puy. (What does the next half bring? Hopefully I’ll get these posts out a little more quickly, but here’s a sneak peek: RAIN).

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A Girl in a Tower; Day 6 on the Chemin du Puy, Aumont-Aubrac to Aubrac, 36km

August 8, 2017

If I’d gotten what I’d needed on my 5th day of walking (a German walking companion, a delicious baguette eaten in a park, a private room in a clean gîte, etc), then I also got what I needed on my 6th day of walking. It just looked a little different.

The day before had been a short one- only 8km! To balance things out a bit I countered that with a 36km day and even though this is a distance I’ve done before (many times, by now), I was just a touch nervous. Now I’m not even sure why, but I suppose it could have been because I had been doing much shorter days up until that point. And I was “in between” things, at least it felt that way: everyone I’d met in the previous 5 days was ahead of me, and I knew that my long day would probably catch me up, but I wasn’t sure. Two years before, when I walked the Camino del Norte, I’d somehow gotten myself very off stage and was in a strange “in between” zone for about 3 days. I’d met tons of great people over two weeks of walking, but suddenly I was alone in albergues and seeing no one on the path, and I guess I didn’t want a repeat of that here, on the Chemin.

After another breakfast of toast and yogurt and fruit and coffee, I set off. The morning was clear and blue and cool. It was the most beautiful morning so far, and I think I must have walked with a smile on my face. I passed churches and little stone chapels, fields of sheep and lines of cows.

I was walking through the Aubrac Plateau, an incredibly unique and- for me- completely unexpected landscape of the Chemin du Puy. It also had a special kind of energy, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Later, I would hear pilgrims say that it was their favorite part of the walk (mine, too), that some could feel great weights being lifted from their shoulders, others could do nothing but cry under the great and open sky.

There is a bit of a mystical legend associated with the area; in 1120, a pilgrim named Adalard was on his way to Santiago and was attacked but, surprisingly, was left unharmed. Because of this he vowed to build a monastery on the site, so that future pilgrims could find a place of safety and comfort. He did build the monastery- the Dômerie of Aubrac- and the friars decided to clear the forested land around it in order to breed sheep, for cheese (these sheep eventually gave way to cattle, which are now famous for this region). And this land, cleared by the friars of a monastery built by a pilgrim in the 12th century, remains a plateau: wide and open and expansive and a little wild.

I could feel that there was something special going on in this land. I didn’t feel a great weight lifted from my shoulders or break down in tears; for me it was something different. I smiled. I couldn’t stop smiling, in fact, I was laughing and dancing and spinning in circles as I walked down the trail. I felt so happy out there in the sunshine and under that big, blue sky. My legs pumped with incredible energy and I didn’t want to stop walking.

It’s this kind of feeling that I love when I’m on these treks: an unexpected day or moment, when the sun is shining and a wind is blowing and the air feels perfect on my skin. The landscape opens up and I’m all alone, and I’m walking strong and fast and sure. I’m free but I’m grounded, I can see all the way to the horizon and I know that all I have to do, my only task, is to continue walking as far as I can see.

I took a few breaks during the day but mostly I just walked, and walked, and walked. I felt good for nearly the entire day, up until the last few kilometers, and then a little fatigue set in. But soon the path was twisting and began to dip down and further ahead I could see a small village, with a church spire and a few buildings and a tower.

I didn’t connect the dots immediately- not until I walked into the village and stood at the base of the tower and saw other pilgrims. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “I’m staying in something called La Tour des Anglais… but I didn’t realize it was actually going to be a tower.”

It was. But before I could even step inside I saw so many people that I knew: Nassim (the kind man who gave Hilary and I some cherries a few days before) ran over to me and excitedly told me that he’d seen my name on the list of people staying in the tower, and that I was assigned to a bunk in his room. Then I saw the Quebecois couple, Paul Andre and Chantal, who I’d briefly met at a rest stop. With them was Therese, and coming down the stairs was Marie-Lou. (Aside from Nassim, I hadn’t actually learned everyone’s names at this point- they were all familiar to me but only just beginning to become the people I’d get to know on my walk).

I figured out how to check-in and pay for my bed and dinner and breakfast, and then finally made it up to my room. I couldn’t get over it- I was staying in a tower! A tower built in the 15th century and now serves the pilgrims who pass through on their way to Santiago. I wound up the spiral stairs, into a cavernous room with thick stone walls and picked a top bunk (the only beds left) by the window. I stuck my head out the window: below me were pilgrims milling about, to the left was the church, ahead were fields and countryside.

After the usual chores I walked over to the restaurant where we’d be eating that night, and sitting outside on a small terrace were the two French women I’d shared a room with a few nights before (whose names, unfortunately, I never learned or else have forgotten). They waved me over and soon we were joined by Katherine, the German woman, and the four of us sat and drank wine and talked about the day. We spoke in French, but the two French women made an effort to speak slowly and clearly (and I’m just now realizing how much of a difference this made for me- nearly everyone I met on my walk was so kind, but not everyone spoke slowly or clearly and often that made it difficult for me to understand).

There was a group of 9 of us for dinner: the four of us were joined by Nassim (a Moroccan man living in Belgium), Marie-Lou (a French woman in her 60’s), Jerome (a French man probably in his 30’s/40’s), Georges (a French man in his 60’s, who I’d sat next to at dinner on our first night in Le Puy), and Irmhild (a German woman in her 50’s). We spoke French, but because Irmhild, Katherine and I weren’t fluent, the conversation was slower and easier to follow, and sometimes Nassim would jump in and speak English.

And it was such a good, good night. Aside from the two French women, the rest of us were doing the Chemin solo, and I think it’s special to find a group of other solo walkers to spend time with, especially walkers who haven’t really hooked up with a group of their own. It made me feel less isolated, less uncomfortable speaking French or not understanding the conversation. I felt like I was folded into the mix: I asked Georges questions about the other Camino’s he’s walked and he was so happy to tell me his stories. Nassim poured us all more wine, Irmhild laughed and taught me a few German words.

I marveled at how different this evening felt that the previous two: the night before, when I didn’t know anyone in my gîte and ate a restaurant alone, and the night before that, when I was surrounded by people but felt quite alone.

After dinner I found a quiet corner in the bar area of the restaurant and wrote in my journal, and by the time I headed back to my tower the sun had just disappeared behind the horizon. The sky was full of soft hues: the lightest pinks and blues and purples. I went up to the top floor of the tower- as high as I could get- and leaned out the window.

A girl in the top room of a tower in the French countryside- it was like a fairy tale.

I smiled. Just like I’d been doing all day, I smiled.

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Paris of My Dreams

August 4, 2017

I arrived in Paris in my hiking clothes: long green pants that zip off at the knee, a t-shirt over a tank top, my good socks, my sturdy and quite worn in shoes. I wore my pack, too, and over my right shoulder was a small duffel bag, all the extra clothes and items I’d needed for the writer’s retreat I’d just left.

I felt just a little strange, and nervous. My walking stick, which I’d carried for the last 34 days, had been left behind at La Muse; tucked away in the corner of a basement room where, hopefully, I might be able to find it again. My loaded pack felt heavy, though it was a weight that I had gotten used to just weeks before, as I hiked through the Chemin du Puy. Already, I was out of practice.

But I wasn’t in Paris to be a hiker or a walker, was I? I thought that maybe I was here to continue my writer’s retreat but I wasn’t sure about that, either.

All I knew were, well, three things:

1. I missed those full days of walking, and part of me wished that instead of a week in Paris, I had organized a week long trek somewhere new and exciting.

2. I missed La Muse. I missed Homer and the way he would bound up to me and then bound away, dancing in a circle when he knew we were going for a hike. I missed, already, my room with the big window and the view of the mountains, I missed the friends that I’d made, the little writer’s community we’d formed.

3. I love Paris. I really, really love Paris.

But why was I spending a week in the city, alone? What was I going to accomplish here? I already know Paris, at least I know the things that tourists know: where to get a hot crêpe and what the view from the top of Notre Dame looks like, how to find the room with the Van Gogh’s in the Musée d’Orsay and how to open the door of a car on the metro.

I’d spent time in Paris at least a half dozen times during the year I studied abroad in Toulouse, and in the last 4 years, have spent between 1-4 days in Paris every summer. It’s become a regular thing, a mandatory swing through Paris when I’m in Europe. Sometimes all I have to do is buy a baguette and walk down the streets of the Île de St Louis and come upon Notre Dame and stare up in wonder.

Now I was in Paris and I had an entire week and I wondered: am I going to continue to be in love with this city? Am I going to become restless? Will I wish I were somewhere else?

Here are the answers: Yes. No. No.

My days in Paris didn’t exactly have a routine, though I suppose in some ways, little ways, they did. I’d wake up between 7 and 8am, though sometimes if I was awake in the 6 o’clock hour I’d roll out of bed and walk onto my balcony to see if there was a good sunrise. Several times, there was.

Once I was up for good I’d spoon some coffee into the little stove top expresso maker and then take a shower, toweling off just as the coffee was ready. There was a small fridge in the “kitchen” of my place and on my first day I’d stocked it with some essentials: yogurt, fruit, cheese, meat. I’d have a small bowl of yogurt with my coffee and flip through a guidebook and come up with ideas for the day.

Around 9, sometimes earlier, I would set out. The city is quiet in the morning, even at 9 many places are just beginning to think about opening, the tables start to go out in front of the cafes, brooms sweep leaves and trash off the pavement and sometimes I’d pass men or women hosing off the sidewalk in front of their shops. Trash trucks drove up and down the streets, bottles would crash and shatter as recycling bins were emptied.

Usually, the first thing I’d do was stop for another coffee, or a croissant. I found a few cafés that weren’t traditionally French but featured pretty decent coffee, and a few cafés with mediocre coffee and a lot of French charm.

After coffee I would always head off somewhere, walking through the streets, never using the metro (not in the morning, anyway). I went to art museums: the Musée d’Orsay, Espace Dali, the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Musée Rodin. I explored the arrondissements, the neighborhoods: the 5th, the 3rd, the 14th, the 17th, the 6th and 7th, the 3rd and 4th, the 20th. The Latin Quarter, St-Germain, Montparnasse, the Marais, Montmartre.

And more. I walked everywhere. I almost don’t want to write this because it seems absurd, but on two separate days I walked 20km through the city. 20km! Around and around and around.

But I used the metro, too, I love the metro. Even in the summer when it is hot down there in those winding corridors, when the smell is so distinct, it’s a smell that screams to me: “This is Paris. THIS is Paris.” But the metro can take you anywhere, and on the streets you will always find one, there seems to be one at every other turn.

I went to bookshops, and I bought books. I read books, too, in back rooms of the cafés, with a noisette or a flat white (the coffee that is taking over Paris, apparently), and I’d sit and arrange myself on a wooden stool and I would open my book and read.

A few times, I met up with friends: for dinner in a bistrot, for a picnic by the Seine, for a glass of champagne to celebrate my birthday. We shopped for picnic supplies in La Grande Epicerie, a place I’d never been to before and I went back two days later to pick up food for lunches or dinners on my balcony: double crème brie, eggplant and yogurt dip, octopus and prawns and mussels marinated in olive oil, crispy baguettes, fresh raspberries.

I discovered new places: a covered market where I bought hot fries in a newspaper cone, a street market that I walked up and down three times, just to watch the vendors and listen to the sounds. I bought a bottle of wine from a little shop, a chunk of cheese from another.

Parks and cemeteries and canals and squares: I spent a lot of time in outdoor spaces. Jardin du Luxembourg (twice, because it was a 15 minute walk from my apartment), Père Lachaise (twice, because the first time I got turned around and had to leave to meet a friend before I could find Oscar Wilde’s grave. I’ve seen it before- two or three times at least- but it’s like a visit I have to make whenever I’m in Paris. I’m not even sure why, because I’m not a particular fan of Oscar Wilde… I just know that I have to do it). And what else? The Canal Saint-Martin and the Promenade Plantée, the Place des Vosges and the Place de la Contrescarpe. Parc de Belleville.

So many things, all of this and more. But I also spent time in that little apartment of mine- for afternoon catnaps and a glass of wine in the evening, sitting on my balcony and looking out over the rooftops. At 10pm, and again at 11 and again at midnight, thousands of lights on the Eiffel Tower flash and blink, the tower sparkles for 5 minutes and I could see it from my balcony and every night I was home I would stand outside and watch.

Home. That apartment and even Paris, a little bit, began to feel like home. My friend Alex, an Australian writer I’d met at La Muse last summer, moved to Paris in March. She signed a 6-month lease but always intended to stay for at least a year, and when I talked with her about it, her eyes started to shine. “If I can swing it, I want to stay for at least 2 years, maybe 3.”

I asked her a lot of questions about what it had been like to move to Paris, to live in Paris, if the language barrier was a problem, if the cultural barrier was a problem. She told me about a French course she took, how she connected with other expats, her favorite things to do, the site she used to find her apartment.

And I began to dream. What if I could do this? I have an entire life somewhere else but the thing is, I’ve been dreaming about Paris ever since I was 20, from the moment I first laid eyes on the city. And Paris, after all this time, is still a beautiful dream. It’s the city of my dreams.

7 different people asked me for directions during my week in Paris; some of them were tourists but some were French, one- an old lady- might even have been a Parisian. I could only give an answer to one of them, a French guy, and I answered with a smile and with an assurance. I’d understood his question, I knew where we were and where he wanted to go, and I could give a response, in French.

After a week in the city I was beginning to feel like I knew where I was, where I was going. Could I ever have more time like this? More than just a few days, more than a week? Could I live here for a few months, half a year? An entire year?

In my dreams, yes. And if I continue to write and work and aim high and big, if I take chances and with a little (or a lot) of luck, I might just be able to live out my dreams.

But, that’s one of my castles in the air and it’s a beautiful one but for now I’ll be grateful for what is right in front of me: the magical week I just spent in a city that I love, the work it took to get myself there, the chances that I’ve already taken in life, the persistance of my dreams for where they’ve already taken me.

And Paris will always be there. Whether for a few days or a week or a month, a year or a lifetime; it will always be there.

You Get What You Need: Day 5 on the Chemin du Puy, Les Estrets to Aumont-Aubrac, 8km

July 17, 2017

Today, I only walked 8km.

This was all according to plan, but I have to say that initially, I was not pleased. 8km? That’s less than what I typically do after work when I walk around my neighborhood. And this was a day on the Chemin!

But I was doing it out of necessity. One of my previous posts mentioned the trouble around Nasbinals, the town that was hosting a road race for hundreds or thousands of people who had taken all the hotel/gîte rooms.

So my solution around this was to do a really short day, and stop in Aumont-Aubrac, where I had been able to find a bed in a gite. And the following day, I would walk 35km to make up for the shorter day. Now that was the part of the plan I liked: a long day, a physical challenge.

8km, on the other hand, would pass by in the blink of an eye. I tried to linger- I really did- I savored a second cup of coffee, I took a long time lacing my shoes, I was the last to leave my gîte in the morning.

And as I walked, I stopped to take photos and to try to enjoy the view. But my feet felt restless, and I was distracted. When I arrived in Aumont-Aubrac, what in the world was I going to do? I was going to have the entire day at my disposal, I was all alone, and all I really wanted to do was walk.

I was deep in these thoughts when suddenly the boy in the red shirt with the big pack appeared at the side of the trail. There was no avoiding him this time- he started walking just a pace behind me- but I wasn’t in the same mood as the day before. I decided that I might as well say hi and try to be friendly.

It turns out that he wasn’t French afterall- he was German and his name was Sten, a name that means ‘stone’. Even though he could speak English we spoke in French, and I found that I didn’t mind. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it: our levels were pretty evenly matched, and it was so much easier to speak with him than with a native French speaker. We both made mistakes and often had to search for the right word. He spoke slowly and I could understand him easily.

Sten had to catch a bus in Aumont-Aubrac at 9:40am; he had already walked a couple of the upcoming stages so he was going to skip over the sections he had already done. This meant that he had to walk fast in order to catch the bus, but I was able to easily match his pace. It felt good to stretch my legs like this, to move quickly down the trail, to talk easily with the person at my side.

The only downside of walking with someone like this was that I arrived at my destination by 9:20am. We went to a cafe and Sten bought me a coffee, but before I knew it he was standing and shaking my hand and saying how nice it had been to meet me, then was running off to catch his bus.

I watched him go, and then smiled. The interaction had been just what I’d needed, just enough to shake me out of my loneliness over saying goodbye to Hilary, enough to bring me back into the world of the Chemin. And as I sat in the cafe, I watched as people I knew filtered in and out. They came over and said hi, Pierre sat with me while he waited for Stephanie, the young Quebecoise girl. Katherine, a blond German women who had been in the samegîte as I had the night before, talked to me about how out of place she’d felt at dinner. “Really?” I said. “You looked so comfortable.”

“I wasn’t,” she replied. “I try to speak in French but it’s really hard.”

Eventually they all left, on to other towns and other gîtes (most of them had found beds in a gîte that was a bit off the main path of the Chemin. I’d tried to get a bed there as well, but had been too late).

I walked around the small town to get my bearings. It wasn’t a large place, just one main street with several restaurants and shops, a main square full of cafes, a church, a park. I found a boulangerie and bought a sandwich to eat for lunch, I stopped by an epicierie to load up on snacks for the next day.

In the park I settled into a picnic table in the shade, opened up my guidebook, and mapped out a plan for the next several days. I made phone calls too (this was one of my least favorite parts of walking the Chemin; calling ahead to book gîtes meant that I not only had to talk on phone, something I don’t even enjoy doing in English, but I had to speak in French which was still kind of nerve-wracking).

I looped through the town a few more times and then around 1:00 decided to see if I could get into my gîte. I was suprised to see that the door wasn’t locked, and that in the hallway on the bottom floor was a note that said to leave my shoes and pack downstairs, and then go upstairs to see which bed I had been assigned to. The hospitalera would be by in the evening to take our money and stamp our credentials, and in the meantime there were notes and signs all around, instructing us on what to do.

The gîte was perfect. Sometimes on the Camino and on the Chemin you get just what you need, and this had been happening to me all day. The place was clean and bright and modern and spacious. We were in a narrow apartment building and the gîte was spread out over three floors. Above the entryway and downstairs hallway was a floor with a sitting room and the kitchen, along with a couple of bedrooms. And the floor above was where I was staying. There were several rooms up here, too, and I was staying in a room with four beds. Since I was the first to arrive in my room, I could have my pick of beds, and I discovered that my room was actually split into two spaces. One had three beds, and another- behind a curtain- had one bed and a little desk by a large window. It’s like it was meant for me! Maybe it was.

The bathroom was large and clean, there was a rack to dry my clothes outside on the small balcony (set up in the sunshine), there was a fridge where I could keep my fruit and yogurt, there was an outlet right next to my bed where I could plug in my phone. This was gîte paradise.

The rest of the day was slow, relaxing, restorative. The other three beds in my room remained empty, the other pilgrims never showed up. The hospitalera, when she arrived, was so kind and helpful; she gave me the names of other gîtes along the way that she thought I might like, and gave me some advice about the trail for the next day. I met another pilgrim who was also staying in the gite- a guy from the Netherlands who had been carrying a big guitar down the trail. In the afternoon he played for us, slow Spanish flamenco music, the sound filled the rooms and floated down the hallways and out the windows and I was so relaxed I almost fell asleep in my chair.

There was no demi-pension at the gîte so in the evening I went out to one of the restaurants nearby. I wanted something simple so I ordered a goat cheese salad and a glass of wine and I should have known that my salad would be anything but simple: there was the goat cheese over toasted bread slices, yes, but also tomatoes and corn and carrots and peppers and lardons and grilled onions and slivers of garlic.

After dinner I walked through the town again, just to stroll through the streets and stretch my legs before bed. I found my way to the church, stained-glass glowing, empty pews, a line of lit candles and I added my own, giving up a small prayer of thanks for the day, for getting what I needed, for feeling renewed and refreshed and ready for what would come next.

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And there goes our shuttle; Day 4 on the Chemin du Puy, Le Sauvage to Estrets, 21km

July 14, 2017

Here is the image that stands out the most from Day 4 of the Chemin du Puy: standing next to a small chapel in the middle of nowhere, waving our arms wildly at the shuttle hurtling down the road, watching as it passed us by without even slowing down. This was Hilary’s ride back to Le Puy.

But let me back up for a minute. We started our morning in Le Sauvage, eating breakfast after nearly everyone had already finished and headed off for the day. We were in no hurry because Hilary’s shuttle wouldn’t arrive until 11:10am. We would have to walk just a bit- 4km- to the place where the shuttle made its pick-ups; usually shuttles come to the gites, or some central place in town, but since we were in the middle of a field and the only roads were gravely and sandy, the man at La Malle Postale (luggage delivery and shuttle service) told me that the pick-up was 4km away, at the Chapelle de St Roch.

I’d made the shuttle reservation before leaving for France, and then confirmed it in La Malle Postale’s office in Le Puy at the start of our journey. So I wasn’t really worried unil we we met a couple who were also lingering over breakfast. The woman told us that they were also getting picked up by the shuttle- at 11:20- but their pick-up was at the gîte.

This seemed a bit strange, and Hilary and I laughed about that fact that she was going to walk for an hour, only to be picked up by a shuttle that would most likely be taking her right back to where she’d started walking an hour before. But we shrugged it off and walked on, and finally the morning was cool and almost crisp, the path running through a forest track that was quiet and peaceful and beautiful.

We got to the chapelle an hour early, and had plenty of time to eat snacks and for Hilary’s to rearrange her bag, and to sit and talk about the last few days of our journey together. As 11:10 approached we gathered our things and stood as close to the road as possible. We waited, and waited, and I didn’t start to get really anxious until about 11:15. The minutes ticked past and finally, at 11:20, we saw a white van approaching.

“That must be it!” I said, but the vehicle didn’t seem to be slowing down- in fact, I swear it was gaining speed as it drove past. We waved frantically and I’m pretty sure some of the passengers must have seen us but the driver just stared straight ahead, and we watched as the shuttle faded from view.

I immediately got on the phone with La Malle Postale’s office and didn’t even attempt to speak in French as I explained what had just happened. The guy in the office put me on hold as he made a call to another driver who was out in our area, and luckily, in about 5 minutes another shuttle came by and pulled over to pick up Hilary.

I’m still not sure exactly what happened- later, Hilary told me that the driver of her shuttle said that she was lucky that the office had called him and that he was nearby. That first shuttle was the one she was supposed to be on, and it was clear that the driver had no idea he was supposed to pick someone up (although, two girls on the side of the road waving their arms wildly would have been a good tip off…). Something must have gotten mixed up with my reservation, but with an email confirmation AND an in-person confirmation of the date and the time of pick-up, I have no idea what the mix-up was.

In any case, after a long hug and holding back some tears, Hilary got on the shuttle and I watched as it drove away. And man, did I feel strange and alone. It’s worse than the feeling you get when you leave your walking stick behind: it’s like a vital part of my pilgrimage was no longer with me, and I would have to figure out how to carry on without it.

I wasn’t even totally alone just then- a few minutes before Hilary got on the shuttle, a young guy in a red shirt and large backpack had walked up to the chapel and was taking a break there. After Hilary left I saw him lingering but I waited until he packed up and moved on. I was in no mood to meet someone new or try to speak in French or anything else. I just needed a little time to be on my own and to miss Hilary and to adjust to Phase 2 of my pilgrimage.

To be honest, the rest of the day was… off. I didn’t feel particulary strong as I walked, the day grew hot, I was indecisive. I passed through a town that felt abandoned and strange, and even though I was hungry and needed to pick up something for lunch, I walked past several open cafes, not wanting to go inside. I sat in the shade by the church, knowing I should take off my shoes and rest for awhile, but I felt restless. I saw the guy in the red shirt again and still didn’t want to even attempt to say hi.

Eventually I got myself a sandwich and ate it on bench in the shade just outside of town, and then I kept walking, and the day continued to be off. Right on cue, it seemed, dark clouds suddenly rolled in and I was walking at a bit of elevation and without much cover. I was so focused on the clouds and listening to the rumbles of thunder in the distance that I took a wrong turn and got myself off of the Chemin. I think I was happy to be on a path that was heading away from the clouds and towards a patch of blue sky that I didn’t realize I was no longer going the right way. But the Chemin is well marked and after awhile I realized I hadn’t seen the red and white striped waymarkers for quite a long time. Feeling defeated, I turned around and had to trudge back uphill, towards those dark clouds.

I saw one bolt of lightening and that’s when I got scared. Several days before, Mario had warned me about getting stuck in a thunderstorm and now here I was, alone and off-track with a storm brewing. I found the most tucked away spot that I could and crouched down and waited for awhile, unsure of what else to do. Was it safe to keep walking? Was it safe to stay here?

Finally, when I hadn’t heard a rumble of thunder for several minutes and it seemed as though the clouds were beginning to move away, I started walking. I found the Chemin, I continued on, and as luck would have it, not 10 minutes further down the trail was a shelter made of branches and sticks! There were wooden stumps inside and a sign that welcomed pilgrims and I hunkered down in here until I was sure that the threat of the storm had fully passed.

I was actually fairly close to my gîte and arrived after only another 30 minutes of walking. I was staying in another beautiful spot: a large stone building with a big lawn and plenty of space to hang laundry. There was a cozy space inside to sit and read, and you could “order” a drink and the hospitalera would bring it to you from the kitchen. I was sharing a 4 bed room with two other women, and even though I was probably the last to arrive in the gîte, I still had time to shower, wash my clothes and have a glass of wine before dinner.

But dinner was difficult without Hilary. I think I was feeling sad that she was gone, and suddenly self-conscious about speaking French. I was sitting at a table with such nice people-Pierre, who I’d met the day before- was there, so was a young girl from Quebec, and two brothers, and the kind women I was sharing a room with. But the French was spoken so quickly, the voices jumbling together and it was so difficult for me to keep up, to understand what was going on. I felt isolated, sitting at the end of the table and hoping the meal would be over quickly so that I wouldn’t have to keep feeling so awkward, and out of place.

Mostly, I think I needed a little time to transition into this now solo journey, a little time to adjust to being alone and speaking French and needing to meet people and make friends. I tried to remind myself that it doesn’t happen all at once.

Sleep that night was restful, and in the morning the two women I was with agreed: the way to go was to try to stay in a room without men, to be assured of no snoring! (I know it’s no guarantee, but throughout the night we were all quiet as mice, and it was such a relief to get some sound sleep).

Stay tuned for the next post: no room at the Inn, so I need to come up with a plan of how to walk the next few days AND find a bed for the night.

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Oversleeping and Walking Sticks, Day 3 on the Chemin du Puy, Saugues to Le Sauvage, 19km

July 12, 2017

It’s not easy to oversleep on a Camino/Chemin, but Hilary and I figured out how on the morning of Day 3: share a room with 4 people who begin to get up and pack their things before 5am. Listen to them rustle around, bump into things, whisper in the small room. Finally fall back asleep after they leave. Realize, a little after 7am, that you’d forgotten to set an alarm and because there is no longer anyone else in the room with you, you sleep well past the time you’d intended.

7:15am may still seem early, but I can’t remember another day on any Camino when I’d slept so late. By many accounts, the time we started that day shouldn’t have mattered: we were walking 19km- so not a huge day- and we already had our reservation for the night. But there was one factor that did make this late wake-up a slight issue: the heat.

Somehow, we weren’t actually on the road out of town until nearly 9am. Packing up, eating breakfast (no milk for my coffee, grr), searching for a boulangerie, then an epicerie for fruit… and once we finally got moving, we were sweating within minutes.

“How is this possible?” I turned to Hilary, sunglasses already secured over her eyes. “It feels like we’re walking under a hot, mid-day sun.” I paused to catch my breath, and we weren’t even going up a hill. “This is crazy.”

Much of our walk that day was over a dirt track through rolling countryside and deep green forests. The stage wasn’t technically difficult, but the heat was oppressive, and made every step feel like we were climbing a mountain. We ran our buffs under cold water at every opportunity, we listened to music and show tunes to regain energy, and we stopped for breaks. We stopped a lot.

Our first rest was in one of those spots that seems utterly ideal: just as you’re truding along, wishing that the perfect rest stop could appear, BAM! There it is: a picnic table nestled in the shade. This particular spot had an added bonus- a perfectly straight, carved walking stick was propped up against the table. Hilary’s knee had started to act up and we’d been keeping our eye out for a suitable stick, and now here was one that seemed to be waiting for us.

We looked around for an owner of the stick, we took our time and rested and finally decided that either the stick had been left there accidentally- and by taking it with us we might be able to return it to its rightful owner- or the stick had been left there purposefully, for someone who needed it.

So we marched on, sticks in hand (I’d found mine sometime on my first day- crooked and with some sharp bits and at that point I wasn’t sure if I would keep it or not). More cows, more countryside, and then our second rest stop, a beautiful lawn with cold drinks and umbrella-covered tables and puppies running around. One playful guy got a hold of Hilary’s sock and for a long time refused to let go (he also grabbed onto someone’s walking stick- clearly this dog was meant to be on a pilgrimage).

More walking, more resting, and finally we entered the home stretch- a slight uphill section through a forest path that opened up onto a wide-open field in the middle of hills and forests. It was here that the path wound though patches of wildflowers and down to a massive stone complex; the only building in sight (aside from a lone cottage). This is where we’d be staying for the night, in the Domaine du Sauvage.

The day before, one of the men in our gîte told me to look up the history of this place and read all about it in English so that we could understand exactly where we were staying. Hilary and I tried, but all the information we could find was in French, and it was difficult to understand and follow. About all I could gather was that we were in a massive farm building, whose granite stones had probably weathered hundreds and hundreds of years of history.

Despite not understanding where, exactly, we were, the place still had a powerful and special feeling about it. Maybe it was the sweeping sky, so vast; maybe it was the thick, anciet stone walls; maybe it was that there was nothing else out here, just this large building that was here for us, for the pilgrims on their journey, all of us arriving by foot like we’d been arriving for so many years.

We settled into our room, again waiting for a free and open shower. Once all my chores were done I headed downstairs to the main room/bar/restaurant area to try to make a few phone calls. Hilary would be leaving the next day and I hadn’t thought much beyond these first few days of the trip, the part that I was sharing with her. I needed to chart a course for myself, at least for the next few days, and I needed to call ahead to the gîtes I hoped to stay in, and make sure I could reserve a bed.

But right off the bat, I ran into a few problems. I couldn’t get a cell signal anywhere on the property (everyone else was having this problem too) so I asked a man behind the bar if I could borrow the gite’s phone. Another pilgrim was already using it; she had a notebook and papers spread across a table and was sitting with two other pilgrims, shaking her head with a frown.

“Everything is full!” I heard her say, so I hovered nearby and then starting asking questions. It turns out that she was trying to make reservations not for the next night, but for the following one- Saturday- and she couldn’t find anything. There was a big race being held in Nasbinals, a medium-sized town where many pilgrims ended their day’s stage. I’m not sure how many runners were registered for the race, but I heard the number was in the thousands. Not only was everything in Nasbinals booked up, but so were all the gîtes and auberges and hotels in all of the surrounding towns and villages.

Hmm. I borrowed the phone and made my reservation for the next night and decided to worry about what to do on Saturday later.

Dinner that night was much better than the awkwardness of the previous night, in Saugues. Earlier that evening I’d met Pierre, a French man who had just retired and was walking to Santiago. When Hilary and I found seats at an empty table, Pierre asked to join us. Two older French women also came to the table, along with another American- Stephen, from St Louis (he would be the only other American I’d meet on my trip).

It was a good group. There was a mix of French and English, and a lot of laughter and hilarity. And the meal was another good one (as they all would be): vegetable soup, a beef ragu and potato casserole, a cheese plate with three different selections (the sheep’s cheese was the best), an almond cake (that I couldn’t eat because of my nut allergy but I heard it was delicious). Bread, of course, and wine.

Hilary and I stayed up to watch the sun set; we ate gummy candy and compared notes on the day and I thought about how much I would miss her when she left the following morning. Even though I’ve been doing these Camino’s and treks mostly solo, it had been such a joy and so much fun to be with my cousin. There was so much laughter and encouragement and odd moments and joyous singing and shared misery and I wondered what this trip was going to be like without her. I was happy to be entering into a new phase of this pilgrimage, eager to tackle some big days and capture that pure feeling of freedom that only standing totally alone under a big open sky can give me… but I was suddenly nervous, too. I hadn’t even said goodbye and already I was overcome with such a bittersweet feeling: that happiness to have shared something big and amazing with one of my favorite people, the sadness with having to say goodbye and continue on alone.

But that’s been such a big part of these Camino experiences for me, hasn’t it? Being together, being alone.

We couldn’t hold onto the night forever so we gathered up our notebooks, collected our laundry that had dried completely in the hot sun, and tip-toed up to bed.

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Why is it so hot? Why are we still going up? Day 2 on the Chemin du Puy, Combriaux to Saugues, 17km

July 9, 2017

Even though I’ve done this walking thing many times before, it still takes a few days to get into the rhythm of the pilgrim life. I woke up on Day 2 feeling a little disoriented; our room had been hot during the night, and at some point in the night I had flipped myself so that my head was at the foot of the bed, and closer to the window. Once we woke up, we had to tiptoe through the other rooms with sleeping pilgrims in order to get to the bathroom, and we packed our things as silently as possible

And then downstairs to another pilgrim breakfast in France. These breakfasts would all look the same: coffee or tea or hot chocolate, bread and butter and usually at least 3 flavors of jam (many of them homemade), yogurt and sometimes fruit. Once I had a fresh croissant brought over from the boulangerie two doors down (this wouldn’t happen until nearly the end of my trip, and oh what a good morning that was!). I really loved the breakfasts on the Chemin, bread and butter and coffee are my preferred breakfasts at home, too, and it was such a treat to come downstairs every moring and have a spread laid out for us. Unlike on other Caminos, I never had to walk before my morning cup of coffee (well, actually, I had to do this on my very last day but you’ll have to wait for that story).

So after fueling up and rearranging things in our packs, Hilary and I headed out for Day 2. The morning was soft and beautiful, and the beginning of the walk was stunning: we were headed into the hills, climbing above the clouds and looking out onto views that stretched over the countryside.

There was another beautiful view that I loved seeing France, but one of a different sort than the sweeping landscape: the WC. France nails it with their public bathrooms; not only would you sometimes come upon a little shack in the middle of the trail (usually not much more than a toilet, but it’s still a good option), but in so many of the small villages and towns you would always see a sign pointing you towards the nearest WC. Some of these toilets were, ah, quite adventurous, but I appreciated them all.

Our morning was wonderful, and despite the increasing heat, Hilary and I were both in really good spirits. After about 5 or 6km we stopped in the small village of Monistrol-d’Allier for a coffee and a snack; this would be just before starting a long and diffficult ascent and fueling up seemed like a good idea.

We ran into Mario, our French translator and fellow pilgrim from the night before, and he told us about the amazing sandwiches the cafe could prepare for us to take along. He held up a wrapped sandwich that was roughly the size of his head. “Local goat cheese with a carmalized onion and fig compote,” he said. “You don’t want to miss this.”

Hilary and I were both already a bit loaded down with food; we’d picked up Babel cheeses wrapped in wax that could last the journey, as well as little sausages and a loaf of day old bread. Suddenly, our lunch options didn’t seem so appetizing, and we made what I think might have been one of the best decisions of the trip: to buy the sandwiches with fresh and local ingredients. (Later, we spread out on the grass for a long picnic lunch and those sandwiches were, indeed, the best sandwiches I’d ever tasted. It helped that we’d walked a long day and were hungry, but then again we were also in France, where the food truly is top notch).

Our packs now even more weighed down, we began our ascent. The guidebook we were using (along with all the French) was the Miam Miam Dodo. It breaks down each stage into detailed sections and shows either a green, orange, or red line (going up, down, or flat) to illustrate the difficulty of the grade of the route. Green is easy, orange is tougher, red is difficult. And very quickly, we came to regard the red line (especially a red line going up), as the enemy.

We began a nearly 4km stretch of ‘red up’, and remember, this was during the European heat wave. We were drenched in sweat within minutes. We criss-crossed on the trail in order to find tiny sections of shade. Water breaks were only taken in the shade. The buffs came out, and for the first time on any Camino, I discovered the momentary delight of running the buff under a cool stream of fountain water, then wrapping it around my head.

But despite the heat this continued to be a good day. Other highlights included: stopping in a chapel carved into the rock of a hillside, our first walk alongside a line of cows, a kind man resting in the shade of a tree who gave us cherries, the wooden carvings lining the entrance to Saugues- our destination for the evening. The day’s walk was only about 17km (but with the ascents and heat I wouldn’t call it an easy day), but it meant that we had time for long, leisurely breaks, and still arrrived to our gîte an hour before it opened.

But once we did get inside, we discovered that there was only one shower for 8 pilgrims (this, too, would become a theme of the trip). There was a lot of waiting around in our sweaty clothes, a storm rolled in and cooled off the air a bit, and once we were finally cleaned up we headed into town to explore and find some ice cream.

Dinner that night was, in a word, awkward. I don’t even know if it would have helped much if my French were stronger; the combination of people around the table was not a good one, and there were a lot of long silences. Then, when dinner was over and the owner of the gîte was trying to arrange a breakfast time, there seemed to be a tense moment. The group of 4 pilgrims staying in our room were pretty insistent on ther 5:30am start time (the only time I would see anyone leave this early on this Camino), and the owner of the gîte didn’t want to serve breakfast that early. There was a lot of back and forth that I didn’t completely understand, but it was finally understood that we’d all help ourselves to breakfast, whenever we decided to get up. (All the while, in the background a radio played 90’s soft rock and sometimes I’d just disengage from trying to understand the conversation and instead tune into Whitney Houston and Celine Dion).

Hilary and I escaped once dinner was over and headed back into town for a pre-bedtime glass of wine, and when we returned to the gîte we sat outside with the kind dog, watching the day’s light fade to black, strains of soft rock drifting through the air.

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