Best Of France

We’ve seen so many things since we started this journey and every time we see something different or new we say; “This is the best thing so far!” It’s not completely wrong since every time we actually see something new or different it feels like we have discovered something for the first time and the feeling we get is amazing.

This trail that we have been walking this week has been the absolutely best part of France we’ve been in so far. We started in Cahors and walked our way to Rocamadour, we really took our time to see everything we wanted along the way too. For example we normally try to stay on trail to make sure we find our way and don’t get lost (it’s easier than you think in France) but on our first day we met a pilgrim, he told us about a shortcut to the first village “Verse”. He told us to cross a bridge used as an old railroad and we thought why not. Often you read a fiction or fantasy book or look at an adventure movie where they actually cross these huge iron railway bridges and we for sure never thought we would actually do that.

Otherwise this trail has shown a huge variety of nature and animals, the most striking natural beauties we’ve seen has been the cliffs and the gorges. The forest has also shown some amazing sights and narrow paths in the grooves. However the only famous way for us to know that we are in southern France are the sunflowers.

Southern France also has a lot of corn fields and believe it or not, it is very common with bamboo, which we think is a beautiful touch to come along in the nature. Fruits and berries are more than common along the way and we do our best to eat as much wild fruits as possible.

It is not expensive to buy fruit in the villages either and if you want it really cheap you should by them at a towns market. However everything is not cheap on the markets so it’s important to take care not to get ripped off just because it looks cheaper. You can find a lot cool things on these markets though.

Only some days after we began our hike in this area we heard that there was a huge fire in the southeast of France and that they’ve had to evacuate over 150 thousand people from the area. We are now happy that we are here, because we were considering going to the southeast first to hike around before our workaway began. Now we are instead on top of a mountain rather than the beach, which is equally as nice. We hope that there will not be too much damage from the fire and that people and the tourists in the area are fine.

Vattie is now fine and her paws are good for hiking, she has to use her shoes on these really hot days because we don’t want her to get blisters. However now Cecilia gets blisters from her new shoes and the sandals as well. We bought new shoes in Lyon, but her shoes were destroyed after only a week of hiking so she bought new ones in Cahors. These she get blisters from which is equally as bad, but she pushes on through and we take it a little easier.

We are more than happy to take it easy because the camping sites we’ve been at these few days have been filled with French people on vacation, and parties. This means it has been a little hard for us to sleep at night. Now in Rocamadour we’ve found a good camping site with not that many people and we’re happy to stay here. Rocamadour is a beautiful medieval town built into a Cliff side with a castle on the top of it. We haven’t explored it yet but we are looking forward to it!

Á Bientot!