At the crossroads I sit, with your voice in my heart and your image burned into my soul

I offer you all my apologies for failing to be able to up-load things for the last few days.

Alison has, from time to time, been able to do Facebook things and once I might have been able to do something but the wifi facilities in some places are just terrible – do not buy those wifi services from Logis hotels (with little things like a credit card and a scratch-off password) and avoid the free versions(also with Logis) which involve going on to some second rate service brokered by an internet site to get access – they are awful and often don’t work when you try to do anything more than search or do basic emails on them.

Anyway, I will up load some other stuff later. For the moment, I just want to reflect on the weirdness and wonderful nature of this world.

We have been travelling through France without knowing where we would end up each night and without knowing what the day would bring.

So, we have arrived at so many places hoping to be able to stay in, for example, a camp site, only to find the campsite closed or we have expected to find a hotel only to discover that all of the hotels there closed long ago. Each time, we have had a different experience when trying to find our night stop.

Once, as you know, we ended up walking and walking until we were not able to walk anymore and then we ended up in a strange and quite scary situation where we set camp (illegally) in a wooded area between a sports hall, TGV main line track and a noisy road. Other times we have walked beyond our night stop to find campsites in other towns or where the campsite was in a strange farm (where we were kept awake all night by the singing of a nightingale) and then, on another occasion, we arrived at our night stop and, after searching and searching found there was no where for us to stay. The next place was about 14 km further on and so the tourist information place booked us a bed - but would not order us a taxi to take us there as it was too far away and she did not think a taxi would take us so far. So we ended up walking a further 9 kilometres to the place where we would meet the taxi. We then discovered that the taxi had driven all the way from the place we had walked from any way....? So we missed being able to have a meal in order to walk there for what reason????

Despite this, mostly, something both deeply interesting and something enlightening has occurred as a result of these detours/diversions.

I will write more about these anon, but just want to express our delight springing from our most recent experience.

Contrary to so many other nights, we actually booked this evening’s bed a few days before. We searched the internet for a place to stay on the night before walking into Vezelay because we expected to have been camping for the previous 3 nights and wanted somewhere to rest before doing the final stretch there. We also had to decide the final night’s location so we would have a reasonable day’s walk but wanted to try to avoid a very long last day. After much discussion we focused on Mailly le Chateau and found a Chambre d’Hote that fitted the bill there which, miraculously, was run by a person who had been inspired by the Camino and had named her establishment “el Camino” as a result.

Alison emailed her and said, “if there is a problem please text me". We received no text so assumed everything was OK.

Then we arrived at there to find it a lot quieter than we had expected and wandered around the place admiring it (the village is mainly set on the edge of the cliff looking down on the river valley) but failing to find the night stop. So, we went down to the lower part of the village nearest the river and almost immediately found it. The owner and her friend welcomed us with great fanfare and we settled in feeling very thankful that the place existed. Given our previous experiences, we had begun to wonder exactly where we were going to end up sleeping tonight. We had even considered the (not unlikely) possibility that the reason why we had not received any text was because there was no longer anywhere called the “el Camino” in the town.

So, it was wonderful to be greeted so well, to enjoy such good company and such good conversation with the people there (the owner and her two friends, husband and wife).

But it was even more extraordinary in the end.

Our hostess, during a discussion based on cheese and the accompaniments for it explained in an aside that her friend could speak Spanish because her parents had been Spanish and had escaped Franco’s regime during the Civil War. They had, she added, crossed the Pyrenees and remained in France. Alison, warming to the story said that we loved the Pyrenees, and added that we had been on holiday a few times to a house in the foothills of the Pyrenees in a place called... and I could see our hostess saying in French, “don’t say it’s called...” and Alison said “Chalabre” and everyone fell about in amazement as that is where the Spanish couple had settled and where the friend had been born and brought up.

I was deeply disappointed that I didn’t have the Chalabre pictures with me on the computer – I have the text of my book based there (called “Redemption Song”) but had not added the supporting files with all of the pictures, maps, etc. but it was just one of those wonderful moments when the world seems so ridiculously small and when we, as human beings discover that we are just a large family.

So, I will stop and leave you with the idea that we are all connected in some way, we are all part of a greater commune, there is more that binds us together than that keeps us apart and we should always seek to find those connections. It is what art and music often accomplish when they work, it is what literature expresses and explores and it is what we discover every time we share food, drink and company. So why is it so easy to forget this universal truth ... and why do some people seek to deny it or destroy our connections?

I will go to sleep now and ponder these questions..... good night world!