Saint Astier - Mussidan – Saint Gery – Saint Foy la Grande
Memo to myself and a good tip to everybody else: never ever sleep without a tent next to some huge amount of water.
My sleeping bag was very moist in its lower region in the morning, which means I woke with very cold feet. Luckily I know a nice way to heat them up: cycling.
I entered Saint Astier very early and left it not much later. On the road to Saint Louis en l’Isle there weren’t much cars nor hills. That’s how I like to start the day.
At the small café of Saint Louis I ordered a coffee and reported of my first journey. In 2015 I stopped here to have a beer and watch the local boule-championship. During the second coffee Günter entered the bar and asked for some breakfast. Thanks to his tiny vocabulary combined with a terrible pronunciation I offered myself as a translator and ordered a petite-dejeuner avec café for him.
Soon we figured out that we’re both from the same region of Germany within a radius of about fifty kilometers. We drank another coffee and exchanged some tips and informations. After a few pictures Günter started first while I took some advises from the owner of the café. I caught up with him five minutes later and we walked together to Mussidan.
We spend some time looking for a bar in Mussidan and then we also spend some time drinking a few beers.
A little drunk we missed to take the first street to the right and parted halfway out of town on the second/ wrong street to the right. Günter had to climb a very steep passage between to houses and I zigzagged up the hill through Mussidan’s “suburbs”.
At Saint Gery I met Marie-Claire, Uljana and Alex when I was totally finished pushing Rosinante up the hill at the village-entrance. I sat with them in the shadow, offered some scotch to the pilgrims and talked about what has been and will be. Alex kept on looking at me very thoughtful even since my arrival and when I spoke of Spain and the first camino, he jumped up and said:
“Man, we have met there. I knew I saw you somewhere else. Your one of the reasons I walk to Santiago a second time. What a coincidence.”
F*** the duck – coincidence, yeah! One coffee less and I wouldn’t have met Günter, means no beers, means no pilgrims at St. Gery. And now I sat there with another fellow of the mysterious first camino.
After we parted I hurried to reach Saint Foy, because my plan was to write some more pages in the pilgrims-shelter, but by now I only managed to go half the way and hang around with pilgrims drinking alcohol, which was quite the opposite.
I arrived in the afternoon, asked for the keys at the hospital and while waiting for an hour I realized how exhausted I was.
At the refuge I just took a shower, washed my clothes and went to bed after dinner. When I was nearly asleep I heard some noise at the door and was fully awake in an instance. Luckily there were no burglars. Instead Uljana and Alex were standing in the door, asking if it would be possible to sleep here. I told them that there was only one bed available and that they could just leave some money on the livre d’or. They took a shower prepared for the night and at around one o’clock we went to bed. Much too late for my plan but in the end plans usually fail.
