Another long, hot day of adventures on the Grand Randonée 653A!
Started off with a self-service breakfast at the Abbaye de Notre Dame de la Paix. The nuns had left fruit, baguettes and jam, tea, instant coffee and powdered milk out for us the night before, with instructions to wash the dishes and put everything away afterwards.
The night before we had said adieu to Phillipe, who left early to walk 30 km to his cousins' home in Tourrette-sur-loup, and au revoir to Elisabeth, the Austrian pilgrim we met along the way; as there are no special accommodations for pilgrims in Vence, we agreed to book a triple room to share with her at the Hotel Miramar at the end of our route for the day. They headed back uphill to Aspremont to get back onto the GR653A, while we thought we would avoid retracing our steps back uphill along the road with no shoulder that we had walked down the evening before; we thought we would try heading downhill along a path through the woods and then walking along the road by the river Var to the bridge, joining the GR path there. It sounded like a good idea... but the first path we tried ended abruptly at a fenced-off vegetable garden. So we took a gravel forestry service road instead... and then another path through the woods which was not at all well-maintained and had some pretty rough spots in it. At one point we were both stuck on a small bit where we felt safe leaning against a tree, unable to go either forward or back... until I slid back on my bottom and found another way up the slope through an olive grove, while Mariella scrambled up through a patch of brambles; we met on the road above the woods. We then laughed about it for the rest of the day, but we decided not to take any more shortcuts!!
Mariella facing a challenging stretch of path
...and fording a stream
Emerging onto the aptly named Chemin du Grand Bois
After this we walked on the shoulder of the highway along the river to the bridge. I had been hoping for a riverside pathway like the one in my home town, and it looked like there might be one, on the map; but it turned out that the river bank had been damaged by flooding at some time in the past and was one big construction site. So after a few noisy but not dangerous km walking along the highway shoulder/cycling lane, we came to the bridge and crossed the Var between Colomar and Carros.
Climbing up in the other side, we had a fantastic view of Carros and the River Var.
And we came across a Roman sarcofagus set in the wall right by the road on our way up to Gattieres!
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| View of Gattieres from below |
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Lavoir in Gattieres
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Between Gattieres and La Gaude we passed through a very hot, exposed stretch of country with no public fountains at all, and in La Gaude we had to ask a woman in the window of her house to fill our water bottles from her tap.
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Leaving La Gaude
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The final climb of the day up the old road to Vence |
After a pleasant walk along the old cobbled road to Vence through the woods, as we emerged onto the asphalt for the last few km up the hill into the town, we saw a familiar figure only a few hundred metres ahead of us. Orange t-shirt, white socks hung to dry on a black backpack: it could only be Phillipe! A few hundred metres is a long way when walking uphill carrying 7 or 8 kg on your back, at the end of a long day, but I managed to close the gap and catch up with him eventually. It turned out that, after setting out more than an hour ahead of us, he had had some adventures of his own, which set him back a bit. He still had another 6 km to go, but we had reached our destination: Hotel Miramar.
What better ending to a day of walking in the hot sun of the Côte d'Azur than a dip in an ice-cold October swimming pool!
A well-earned rest after 24 km, with a total climb of 871 metres!
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