ST 3: Rained on like Robert

We had a very nice dinner last night with 12 French walkers during which not a word of English was spoken, although much French was mangled. Our auberge was part of a farm which grows the local staple of Le Puy green lentils. So we had lentils and tomatoes from the farm for our first course.

Jennifer followed up on the theme by having lentil jam, made by the farmer’s wife, with her breakfast. I took that as a step too far.

We covered over 27km today in good time, chivvied along by a wet, chill wind. We were lucky in that it always seemed to be raining beside us or ahead of us, but not really on top of us. We were, however, the only walkers persisting in walking in t-shirts – the French, we decided, are made of weaker stuff.

Our walk today took us through some rough high plateau, past a huge viaduct, through some nice valleys, and through one of France’s prettiest villages. It was not, as the person sitting next to me at dinner last night insisted, the prettiest village in France and therefore the prettiest in the World; but it was pretty enough to qualify for the prettiest villages group that France has been officially naming since 1902.

As we walked into Langonge the rain started to come down more strongly and we realized that Robert Louis Stevenson had written of exactly the same thing – the rain starting just as he crossed the bridge into Langogne.

Donkey count remains at zero.