Saint-Jean-de-la-Blaquiere - Lodève
18.5 km
Today was supposed to be an easy day. My guidebook said 13 km... which turned out to be 18.5! Admittedly, that includes a detour to cross a bridge rather than ford a stream, another short extension to visit a priory and a dolmen, and a turn about a labyrinth! Every day on the Way is full of surprises.
The first one this morning was coming upon this:
So we took off our boots and waded across. Here is Jiheun putting hers back on, in a ray of morning sunshine:
The next village, Usclas-du-bosc, turned out to have a collection of interesting 15th century round tombstones in the local cemetery.
A little further along the trail was the late twelfth-century priory of Saint-Michel de Grandmont, on a site that has obviously been sacred since prehistory, as the grounds also contain a dolmen and a number of stones carved for mysterious pagan rituals.
A little further along the way, this was followed by a stone construction for more recent rituals:
The labyrinth is a symbol of pilgrimage, and so of course we had to walk all the way through to the end!
Spent the evening in our airbnb flat in Lodève doing laundry (the owners let us use their washing machine! Truly clean clothes tomorrow, not just rinsed out under the bathroom tap!) and planning our itinerary for the next few days. We have three days in the Hérault mountains ahead of us, with no drinking water and very limited possibilities for accommodations and meals, so we needed to do a bit of preparation! A few tricky phone calls in French later, we have our accommodations for the next two nights booked and have managed to divide what would have been two very long, steep stages into three shorter ones. We have bought some supplies for tomorrow and ordered our supper cooked for us when we get to the refuge at the top of the mountains the next night.
If you don't hear from us in the next few days, either there's no cell phone reception in the mountains... or an eagle has carried us off to its eyrie!
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