Day Four
Our grandmother hostess has been up early and has brought over the breakfast. This time we are treated to home made yoghurt from the farm which is delicious. It is still dark as we join our fellow travellers over the old farm dining table and discuss our day. Most of us are going to the same town but the two French sisters opt for a town they think will be smaller. So with hearty farewells we set off. This time it is a dry exit. We nearly get bowled over just as we exit the door onto the village street by the small school van which comes careening around the corner, slams on its brakes idles very impatiently waiting for one little wayward child to hop on board. The running footsteps announce her arrival and then with a roar of the engine the van is gone. This van will be only one of a few of the vehicles we will see today.

Have I mentioned the hills in previous entries? Probably! Well they were there again today. It is uncanny with these towns- as you leave you need to climb out and then when you approach a new town you guessed it you need to climb( crawl ) down. So while it is nice to see anew village it is also a pain (literally). The thing that helps with this pain is at the moment it is autumn and the trees and their leaves are giving us a psychaeldic show of colour. Often when you lift your head to look over the valley you see a myriad of reds and yellows flaunting their beauty. It is indeed an incredible sight of beauty and the pain seems a small price to pay for this generous gift.

I have my washing pinned to the back of the backpack ( great use of nappy pins- which may I say are very hard to find these days) and I feel like a washer woman of any age or country as the weather today was so unpredictable- it would start to sprinkle so I would stop and put my washing inside the outer pockets, and put the plastic back pack cover on, next minute out comes the sun, stop take the back pack cover off and take the socks out of the pockets, until maybe 15 minutes later the rain starts falling again. This cycle was repeated most of the day. It was as if the weather gods were bored and thought they would have a little joke at my expense. As you can imagine the socks didn't dry so looks like the old socks will be recycled tomorrow.

We have co- ordinated our walking by chance with several groups of people and it is lovely coming across them on the track or at a rest stop. At one particular coffee break I was excited to see that there were pears to purchase but I thought the sign said 9.50 euro and was aghast at such exorbitant costs. One of the Parisian walkers had observed all this and also thought a pear was a good idea but next I find he has bought me one and explained that it was only 0.50 I had confused the writing of the 9& 0 . It was with much pleasure that I ate this pear and was so touched by this generous and kind gesture.
We came across the pear man later on the track looking forlorn as his glasses had come off his shirt as he too had been taking on and off his wet weather gear and they must have been displaced. Since we were behind him he thought we might have noticed them. Sadly we were unable to give him any good news.
Today is a three blister day for me and for some reason my shins are sore. I find that it was necessary to reach for the painkillers. It was therefore disheartening to face yet another steep descent into St Albans and yet more disheartening find our gite is actually a bar ( like a pub with rooms available upstairs) and it doesn't open until 5.30pm This is not good news when you legs and feet are aching, you need a shower and what are you going to do for 1 and 1/2 hours. No need to fear - we are finding that the chemin/ Camino always provides and so it is again now.

As we walk along the street but who should pop his head out of one of the gites/ bar is Alban who was the walking companion of pear man. He is from Pontier and immediately welcomes us to the town ( he is very proud of the town as it bears his name) and invites us to wait in his bar and to join him and a Quebecian ( not sure of the spelling but what I mean is someone from Quebec) for dinner since our gite does not provide dinner . Alban is quite excited as the Swiss girl from Geneva( who I mentioned yesterday I think) had walked into the bar and announced ' what funny things you find on the track- she had found the missing glasses of pear man! As I say the Camino is a bit uncanny that way.
As we sit and chat, the lady of the restaurant decides to deliver her own rant and you can tell by the body language and much gesturing that something is amiss. Alban explains that she is tired of people just coming into her bar and not greeting her or the barman. They take the greeting of bonjour very seriously obviously. We tentatively ask her that hopefully Australians have not been too bad to deal with- her reply was a download about how one couple came to stay but instead of using two beds they used five. Mon dieu!! We told her that we would look into it and hopefully we can sort them out. We weren't sure if we wanted to return here for dinner tohave such a grumpy hostess but the thought of having the camaraderie of these people we had only met over the past few days but it felt like we had been friends for awhile beckoned us to come back.
We hadn't expected much from the dinner as the enterprise was very basic. The decor was plastic tablecloths and folding furniture, old calendars and stacked newspapers. You probably would have kept walking normally but looks can deceive and madam ( who now was putting on a charming face) delivered a most amazing meal. For 13 euros each we had nibbles of salami and pâté , followed by egg & tomato salad with quinoa, then a range of main meal dishes- pork, fish and beef and an incredible spinach dish with cheese. Of course there was cheese next but this time a big plate of 4 varieties and then dessert of fruit salad. I forgot to mention it came with a flagon of very acceptable red wine. So the moral as always is not to judge others by the cover.
We returned the next day for breakfast and again Madame provided an amazing spread- with much shaking of hands au revoirs and a few more 'Mercis' I think we have saved the Australian French link for this lady at least.

PS I am resorting to using Instagram for posting photos - this blog takes too long to upload and I run out of my download- let me know if you have trouble finding my account.