- Distance: 10.5km
- Ascent/Descent: 209m up, 202m down
- Time: 2 hr 51 min
Yesterday’s sportif day demands a day of recovery, so we take the GR10 BMT to St Jean.
After falling asleep immediately after dinner last night (and drinking a liter of water before bed—-not too much), we decided to start early-ish and beat the heat and just do a quick road walk to St Jean, some 12km away.
We are not going to run out of water again, so we stop at Spar and get 6 liters of water, and I get a 1.25L bottle of Coke as a treat. It’s a road walk, so we took a side road up and over a hill, yeah we’re sore, caught up with the main road, and stopped at a village named Irouléguy along the way because there was a tree/table icon on the IGN topo map. Table yes, no tree, and the wisteria vine covering the pergola had been cut down. Sad, so we sat in the 28C sun and listened to the sparsely attended church service next door. Figure maybe a dozen people attended.
More walking, not much traffic, then when sidewalks appeared we were getting close. Got to the hotel around noon, but sadly the room isn’t ready, so we hung out on the square in the heat, under a canopy, and were fortunate that a dry wind came up after an hour. This region feels like somewhere in northern California in summer, like Ukiah.
Checked in, and got to a task I’d been wanting to do for days: get rid of stuff. Do I need two collared shirts? No. Do I need six pairs of socks? No. Why do I really need to carry four reading glasses? Tomorrow we’ll go to the post office and mail a care package to ourselves and pick it up at the end of the trip—we have friends that live close to the end.
One thing that is coincidentally lucky is that the heat wave peaks tomorrow. Good day for a zero-- and our hotel room has air conditioning, even more of a bonus.
