0800 hrs, Toulouse Ibis
Oh, that was a wonderful nights sleep here at the Ibis at the Toulouse main train station. It's quiet here on the 4th floor, and the bed is wonderfully comfortable--and best of all, there is air conditioning, and it kept the room at a comfortable 22C all night .
The heat has been bad, which is obvious if you read the blog posts--it's not a dry heat. For our typical 16 to 18km walks (10 or 11 miles), we've been carrying about 4.5 liters of water. That's heavy, but we ran out of water on the third day and don't want that to happen again. What I haven't mentioned is that there is very little AC, just one place out of the 30 places we stayed at. Fans are very uncommon as well, the first place had a small table fan, and La Patio De Luchon actually had an oscillating pedestal fan, but nowhere else.
And it's been unusually hot here in southwestern France since mid-June. These buildings with the thick stone walls have been building up heat for six weeks or more; you can feel it in the morning on their shady sides, the air will be coolish and humid, but get close to the walls and you can feel the heat radiating from them.
This means sleep has been generally miserable, our room is generally around 30C (86F) when we go to bed, pillows and sheets end up soaked with sweat by midnight, and maybe it'll cool down a bit by 2 or 4am. Windows are always open as we go to sleep, and a cool shower helps for maybe 30 minutes.
It's exhausting. So we're just enjoying this cool (and large!) hotel room for once, will linger over breakfast, then pick up the rental car from Alamo around noon. And the rental car will have air conditioning, which these days shouldn't be a luxury anymore in France.