Le Puy – Sauges
54.1km, 5hrs 49mins, 1464m total climb
After a nice healthy bowl of half a box of cereal each and
a cup of coffee, and about an hour of wrapping up the tent and our
belongings, we left Le Puy at around 10am.
From the elevation plot on the GPS we
already knew that this is going to be another day of a slow climb
with a shallow but seemingly never-ending gradient. The first 20km or
so were just that. It was clear now that we were on a famous
pilgrim’s route and we started seeing the first people with heavy
rucksacks just after we left Le Puy. As to be expected the route took
us through little villages with a more or less important church to
visit. We stopped in one of the first places after about 15km, Bains
and had a look at the Paroisse St Jean. There were a few pilgrims
sitting outside enjoying what looked like their first break for the
day.
Just after leaving Bains we saw three
other touring cyclists sitting on the side of the road and one of the
women started chatting to us as we past. We exchanged a few words –
where we came from, where they are going and it turned out that we
were heading for the same campsite in Sauges.
In one of the
other small towns that the Compostella route leads you through Greg
stopped at a pharmacy to weigh himself. Coming out with a grin on his
face as he has lost 6 kilos since starting the cycle despite
increasing his calorie intake by several hundred percent.
Just after the
rewarding downhill and before we started the second climb of the day
(about another 20km almost until the end), we found ourselves right
in the middle of les Gorges de L'Allier, with a wild river and
surprisingly a train line running right through the middle.
We arrived in
Sauges at around 3pm and set up our tent in the municipal campsite of
the town. Very nice and close to a pretty little fishing lake.
Brilliant value for money, 6.40EUR for the night. As we were
constructing out tent we said hello to a young pilgrim who was
walking into the campsite with a huge rucksack and looked completely
shattered. He found a pitch, lay down on the ground and past out for
two hours. He must have been completely exhausted.
We were both
starving ourselves and went to the local supermarket to buy our
dinner which was one large can of pork cassoulet, one large can of
charcouterie in Sauerkraut and one large baguette and two apple puff
pastries.
After we had our
dinner at a bench near the lake, we went back to our tent to find the
three French cyclists we met earlier setting up camp next to our tent
about 2hours after we arrived. After another slightly longer chat, we
walked to Sauges centre to have a look at what Sauges' church had on
offer. Turned out we were also on some other route following Le Bete
(the beast) which we kept seeing signs for and the theme of
everywhere.
We also meant to
get one of those pilgrim's booklets, you get a stamp from every town
you are passing on the St Jacob's Way. The guy at the reception of
the campsite offered us a stamp and we thought it would be a nice
memory and also one of the other French cyclists mentioned that you
can get discounts on hostels/hotels in Spain if you have the booklet.
So one of our missions was to find the place that sold them (5EUR per
booklet!), but as the place was closed and we didn't feel that
committed to the idea and also the discount only works on hotels and
not on campsites, we thought we put more effort in another day to
find it.
We returned to the
camp-site and spent the rest of the evening in our tent playing cards
and eating cookies and other things you can only get away with when
you cycle it off the next day!. Tough life :)
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