Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.

Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

It was just past 4pm. I had been waiting outside the gite I had booked at Sétoux for nearly an hour and there was a band of dark menacing looking rain clouds heading in our direction.

Sitting outside with me were 3 Swiss German walkers called Ernst, Dani and Ulrike, who were shaking their heads disconsolately as the dark rainclouds started spitting out flashes of lightning accompanied by the crack of thunder.

The reason we had been told we couldn’t enter the gite and rest our weary feet, as well as shelter from the approaching storm, was very simple – the entire gite had been booked by a French group  for a weekend ‘Cousinade’.

What, you may well ask, is a Cousinade? Well it’s basically a large family reunion where maternal and paternal cousins are invited as well as grandparents, grandchildren, brothers and sisters in law, aunts, uncles, uncle tom cobbley and all!

Needless to say, it took considerable time for this particular cousinade to disperse. I saw one aged family member emerge from the gite carrying a huge metal paella dish which he attempted to cram into the boot of a decrepit Citroen.

Thankfully just as the rain was beginning to fall, one of the cousinade gathering  took pity on us and told us that it would be ok for us to take shelter in the gite. To say that the four of us were mightily relieved would be something of an understatement!

The previous night at Saint- Julien-Molin-Molette hadn’t been the most comfortable I’ve experienced in my life. My sofa bed, which clearly dated from antiquity, boasted a wafer thin mattress that was in dire need of an upgrade.

The accommodation was located bang slap next door to the town church whose clock bells struck with an ear shattering intensity every half hour. Yannick,the proprietor, had also left a window open above my sofa bed and warned me that a cat might well appear at some point during the night to consume the left overs if kofta and kebab that she had brought back from the Turkish take-away next door and deposited on a saucer beside my bed!

Thankfully I survived the night and shared breakfast with Odile, a teacher from Lyons, who had been walking the Via Gebennensis over the previous fortnight. Like me, she’d started in Geneva and was due to finish her walk today at Bourg Argental (7km away) before taking a bus and a train back home to Lyons.

As I only had to walk 25km to Sétoux I decided to accompany Odile to Bourg-Argental rather than heading off on my own. We got chatting about her family, in particular one of her sons who worked as a climbing instructor near Chamonix. One of his clients had recently been involved in a terrible accident which had seen him fall off a glacier and be paralysed from the waist down. Apparently this hadn’t in any way deterred her son from following his passion.

I recounted my own ill fated attempt to conquer Mount Aconcagua (6,962m) in Argentina in 1995 with a group of British climbers including one (Sundheep Dhillon) who was attempting to become the youngest person to do the ‘seven summits’ including Mount Everest (a feat he achieved 3 years later in 1998)

We reached Bourg-Argental just after 11am. There was time for a quick coffee at a café before it was time for Odile to head off and catch a bus back home to Lyon. I’d only met her for less than 24 hours, but we’d already swapped many shared pilgrim experiences including meeting ‘Fred’, staying in the Tower of the English in the Aubrac and the pilgrim hostel near the cathedral in Le Puy. Such are the experiences which forge between fellow pilgrims!

Bourg-Argental was bustling. There was a Sunday market, a large group were gathered outside the town’s main church and most of the shops were open, including several bakeries and a butchers.

I bimbled around Bourg Argental for a good while before heading off towards Sétoux. Most of the afternoon’s walk was uphill and through forestry plantations.

I crossed a mountain pass where the GR65 bisected the GR42 which runs the length of the Rhone before reaching the Mediterranean at Le Grau-de-Roi. All being well, I plan to walk the final 35km stretch from Saint Gilles-du-Gard to Le Grau-de-Roi in 8 day’s time.

The gite at Sétoux was clean and I had a room to my own. However, the supper I had ordered proved a disappointment – a tasteless tabouleh followed by a chunk of minced meat, of some corn beef like description, balanced on a wedge of overcooked roasted potato. It evoked childhood memories of evening meals at my prep school in Northamptonshire!

Worse was to follow in the shape of a peach crumble that looked as though the chef had randomly sprinkled some flour on a jar of baby food.

Warm it might have been vaguely appetising but stone cold it was almost inedible. It was enough to give me withdrawal symptoms for sliced carrots and tinned mustard mackerel!