Joanne's long walks: Road to Home 2023 Day 55: Roche

Friday, June 9, 2023

Road to Home 2023 Day 55: Roche - Ollon

Comme Ulysse, il est nécessaire parfois d’accomplir le tour du monde et de se perdre en mille folies avant de rejoindre Ithaque.

-David le Breton, Marcher la vie: Un art tranquille du bonheur

Those mountains are getting closer!

We took it easy today, walking only 12 kilometres. Mainly because we couldn't find accomodations within a reasonable distance anywhere further down the line! The abbey at St. Maurice is fully booked, and so is the Hôtellerie Franciscaine associated with it; there is some sort of special event going on there over the weekend. We tried a few other places but found nothing; no affordable options turned up on the usual internet sites, either. But we found a room in Ollon, so we had to settle for a short day's hiking, and a lazy afternoon... and now we're wishing all the days could all be like this!

A short, flat walk took us into the lovely town of Aigle. I like it much better than the polished, ultra-fashionable towns on the Swiss Riviera around Lake Geneva! Aigle, a short way up the Rhône valley, is a place I would come back to for a holiday. It's close to both the lake and the mountains, it's surrounded by vineyards, it has a lovely old town centre and a beautiful medieval church. But it's also a place where regular people live and work. We stopped to do some regular things, like taking out money from a cash machine and getting a haircut! I found a Sicilian barber. "I only do men's haircuts, nothing fancy," she said. "I only want a man's haircut, nothing fancy!" I replied. End result: I got a haircut in Switzerland, for no more than I would pay in Italy. And as she is from a Sicilian family, I could refresh my Italian, which has been lying dormant for the past 55 days, except for the occasional phone call home. It was hard to wrap my mouth around the vowel sounds, after speaking only French and English for nearly two months!

Our next stop was the church in Aigle's Cloître district, depicted on the pilgrim stamp we had got at the Tourist Office.

We decided to sit on a bench in the shade outside the church and eat our lunch of bread and cheese from the morning's breakfast buffet. Just across the street was a winery, so we went in and bought a small bottle of Chasselas to go with our bread and cheese. The man who sold it to us was Spanish... from Santiago de Compostela!!! He gave us a couple of glasses and we sat down to our picnic within the grounds of the winery. We were sitting in the landscape depicted on the label of the wine bottle!

We eventually finished our demi-bouteille of wine and gave up our picnic table in the shade of a centuries-old linden tree between the winery and the vineyard. The Via Francigena took us past the 13th-century Château d'Aigle, which now houses the Museum of the Vine, and possibly the best pilgrimage waymarker I have ever seen, on any of my walks! Courtesy of a local winemaker!

From here we climbed up a steep hill, luckily in the forest, as the afternoon was growing warm. We took the shorter of the two possible routes, and were soon heading downhill again into Ollon, where we had no trouble finding the Café de la Fontaine, whose owners make an attic room available to pilgrims - the best-kept secret on the Via Francigena! It's not in the guidebooks, but we found it on gronze.com, which has started covering the Via Francigena between Lausanne and Rome! We were expecting something simple and spartan, but were shown to a beautiful bedroom with adjacent sitting room and bathroom. We quite happily spent the rest of the afternoon here, glad to be already at our destination when rain began to patter down on the skylight. We only left our room to go downstairs to the café for an authentic Swiss fondue... with another glass of Chasselas, of course!