Joanne's long walks: Road to Home 2023 Day 35: Marac

Saturday, May 20, 2023

Road to Home 2023 Day 35: Marac - Langres

In each of us dwells a wanderer, a gypsy, a pilgrim. The purpose here is to call forth that spirit. What matters most on your journey is how deeply you see, how attentively you hear, how richly the encounters are felt in your heart and soul.

—Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage

Our delicious evening meal with Elisabeth in Marac was enriched by the presence of her daughter Maria, her fiancé Alexis and her friend Alix, all of whom spoke excellent English. I found it amazing that Elisabeth continued to accept pilgrims, perfect strangers to her, to stay overnight even when she had all these guests over for the long weekend, plus her autistic son Pierre, who lives elsewhere during the week but spends weekends with her. Elaine and I had taken over Maria's room, for which we apologised, but she said she was used to it: every time she came home from Paris for the weekend, she would find her room occupied by some pilgrim or other! 😄

We said goodbye to Elisabeth in the morning and returned to our old friend the D102 road, stopping to admire an unusual round fountain and a medieval dovecot on the way out of Marac.

The D102 took us to the appropriately named village of Beauchemin; from here another small paved road took us to Saint-Martin-les-Langres, where we briefly rejoined the GR145. We were tempering it with a series of shortcuts suggested by Elisabeth to ensure we would get to Langres early enough to spend a full afternoon in the town. But here we followed the GR down a forest path and across a stream before abandoning the official route again to walk directly up the hill to Langres.

We were in Langres by lunch time; unfortunately we could not check into our hostel until 4:30 pm. But we found plenty to keep us occupied in the meantime! While Elaine was getting a new SIM card for her phone, I went into the cathedral, where I got talking to an Austrian couple who had walked from Saarbrucken, Germany on one of the routes leading (eventually) to Santiago de Compostela. Joachim and Louise, Elaine and I ended up sitting at a table outside a bakery in the town square watching a vintage car rally go by and talking about walks; the Austrians have walked a total of 11,700 kilometres on various pilgrimage routes over the past twenty years!

The bakery had really good pastries, in addition to front row centre seats for watching the vintage cars go by! Oh, and it's called Boulangerie Diderot because we're in the town where Denis Diderot, editor-in-chief of the world's first encyclopedia, was born in 1713.

The capital city of the ancient Gaulish tribe of the Lingones, the town was fortified by the Romans, who gave it the cumbersome name of Andematunnum. It stood at the crossroads of fully 12 Roman roads - which must have made for a very busy intersection, or a very large roundabout! Wisely renamed Lingones after its original inhabitants, and then Langres, the city is set atop a limestone outcrop high above the surrounding countryside and surrounded by walls, with a dozen towers and seven gates. The current fortifications were built in the 19th century in the style of Vauban.

After finally checking into the pilgrim hostel beside the cathedral so that I could put down my backpack and take off my boots, I arranged to meet my friend Haidee for dinner. Haidee is one of the four Canadians I met on my first day, walking out of Calais; two of them have gone home since then. Haidee continues to walk with her husband Henry, but has skipped ahead of him by train to rest a sore knee for a few days. We hadn't seen each other since Bapaume so we had lots of catching up to do over dinner at L'Aromatic, where we also met Esther, a Dutch walker we had met back at the hostel in Châlons-en-Champagne.