Imagine, if you will, two intelligent grown women roaming around St. Gilles for two hours Sunday morning with heavy backpacks and tired bodies (would have been nice for the hotel to warn them that an all night block party/concert would be happening outside their window) trying to find a street leading out of town that mysteriously doesn't exist when finally two rather handsome policemen take pity on their confused expressions and bring it to said women's attention that they're in fact reading the trail directions of an entirely different town. Imagine then the look of shame and embarrassment that consumes them for the next several hours after realizing all they had to do to get out of St. Gilles was to take one second to flip the page. One second. Calling us the Two Stooges doesn't even really do our idiocy justice.
If you have ever considered traveling with us, you may want to reconsider.
So we started our 18-mile day two hours late, letting the coolness of the early morning slip through our sunburned fingers. The hike, however, was beautiful. Sun drenched grapevines, olive trees and apricot orchards, white horses roaming nearly every farm, umbrella and Scots pines, rows of stately poplars, sparkling canals, wild irises, Flanders poppies, and that sweet little red ant that crawled up my leg and took a ferocious bite out of my tender thigh. What a splendid plethora of French countryside marvels.
The second hitch - or as I like to call it 'The Two Stooges Strike Again' - was the fork in the road we missed that added nearly two miles in the hot sun onto our walk. By the time we reached the small town of Vauvert, we were so exhausted and disgusting we sat on benches in the plaza and couldn't find the strength to get up. We killed time talking to a young boy named Antonio who wandered over to us and stared in awe at the fact that we'd been to Las Vegas (the TV show is oddly popular here), while stuffing handfuls of cheese crackers into his mouth that made me salivate with jealousy.
When we then looked at our route and mom realized she'd miscalculated the milage and it was actually a 21 mile day, we decided to stay put instead of walking another seven or eight miles to the village where we had reservations. We have nothing to prove. The body wants what the body wants, and all ours wanted was a shower and rest. Some aimless wandering and four failed phone calls later to local hotels, and we finally found a number tacked to a church bulletin that claimed to shelter pilgrims.
And this is how we came to spend the night on cots in an abandoned schoolroom filled with life-sized statues of saints.
Roger, the man in charge, was as sweet and welcoming as it comes. He'd done the entire pilgrimage himself years ago, and this was how he was paying it back. By taking pity on poor tired sacks like us. The schoolroom was huge, the corners lined with old school equipment and furniture. The shower was heavenly. But the cots... The cots... My body screamed through the night wanting more than anything to stretch out and unfurl from this synthetic cocoon. I was happy, though, to get some fellow pilgrim roommates - two French women from Nice - as it greatly increased the ratio of who might be visited that night by, say, a giant poisonous spider or the ghost of a bullied schoolchild seeking revenge.
That evening we also enjoyed our first pilgrim priced meal. Sipping our discounted red wine we clanked our glasses and realized that in our misadventure and our 5 Euro lodging in a Medieval stone building we'd actually done it. We'd become, for the first time, real 'pelerines' - true Camino pilgrims.
Our schoolroom abode. I kept an eye on our stone friend to the left, what with that sword on his belt and all.
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Location:Aculpulco Hotel, Montpellier, France
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