Road to Home 2023 Day 18: Trefcon - Seraucourt-le-Grand

Le Chemin ce n'est pas le Club Med

- sign posted frequently in pilgrim hostels on the Chemin de Compostelle / Camino de Santiago

Back before Arras, my Canadian friends took a different route from mine and stayed at the castle of Villers-Chatel. The owner, Jean, is a veteran pilgrim himself, which is why he hosts pilgrims in his castle, asking only for a donation toward expenses in return. When I met them again in Arras, my friends reported that the castle, though it looked grand on the outside, was not so glamorous on the inside, at least in the part provided to pilgrims. This may well be explained considering Jean's rating system for pilgrim accomodations, which my friends reported to me.

1 star = a roof

2 stars = a roof and running water

3 stars = a roof, running water, and hot water

4 stars = a roof, running water, hot water, and a bed

I might add that as a logical continuation of this rating system, a 5-star pilgrim accomodation would also have sheets and towels - a rare luxury on the Camino de Santiago, though often provided on the Via Francigena, where costs are proportionately higher. Mostly, walkers carry their own microfibre travel towel and sleeping bag, or liner: like a sleeping bag but consisting only of sheet material, and therefore lighter to carry (especially the ultra-light silk ones).

Now by the above classification, last night's accommodation would be awarded four stars, while tonight's would be three.

The pilgrim apartment at Trefcon is part of a working farm which doubles as a tourist attraction offering river kayaking and horse-riding excursions. It's fine but needs a little maintenance - the plumbing and kitchen appliances, in their current state, should have come with instructions 😆. Like an old car, they had their quirks and required various tricks to get them to work. Between us, we managed to discover their secrets and survive the evening without being scalded by the shower, burning our fingers lighting the gas stove, or having to resort to pouring buckets of water down the toilet to flush it!

This evening in Seraucourt, on the other hand, I was involved in a double case of double-booking. I thought I had booked the caravan the campground provides for pilgrims, and was quite looking forward to it, until Roy and Sue told me they had booked it. I checked again and realised I had not actually received a confirmation reply to my email, sent several days ago. I went onto the campground website and the caravan still appeared to be free, so I booked it and immediately received confirmation. They must have two pilgrims caravans, then, I thought!

Some time later the campground sent me an email apologising and saying that the caravan was already booked. Sue and Roy had called in the meantime, and the pilgrim caravan was reserved for them! So I called the number provided for the other pilgrim accomodation in the town, the municipal gîte, described in the book as trés rustique. The man in charge excused himself while he checked his records, and then confirmed that the gîte was available. That evening at dinner, Guy and Chantal, two French walkers who were also staying in Trefcon, told me they would also be staying at the municipal gîte. Great, I thought, I'll have company! 

But when I arrived in Seraucourt at noon - having taken the shorter route that does not detour into Saint Quentin - and was shown to my room, I realised something was wrong - we couldn't all be staying there! It's basically an old wash-house for boaters on the canal, a small lean-to shed containing two sinks, a campstove, a toilet stall and a shower stall. There are a couple of mattresses leaning up against the wall, and when you want to go to sleep, you put them down on the floor in the kitchen area. Trés rustique, but it's free! If you think of it as a sort of tent with brick walls, electricity and indoor plumbing,  it sounds quite luxurious. And besides, the "back garden" is fabulous - a public park by the river, with plenty of picnic tables!

My "back yard"

The "dining room"

Apparently Guy and Chantal had booked the place several months ago, and the volunteer who keeps the key had evidently forgotten! 

Perhaps when they called last night to confirm, he thought they were me... or that I was one of them... In any case, when they arrived in town, a couple of hours after I had moved in, or "installed myself", as the French say, they called him and he said.... er, there seems to be a problem!

When we all met up for a beer at the bar just across from the gîte, they appeared a bit miffed; so I showed Guy the gîte, to allow him to see what luxury they were missing.😄

The man in charge said he would find them an alternative accommodation, and I'm sure it will be less rustique than mine! So I don't feel too bad about unintentionally stealing it from under their nose. 

Patrick and Elaine, on the other hand, had booked a room - in the wrong town! French place names are often repeated, and they had got the wrong village, about 400 kilometres away! But, apart from not getting their money back on that room, their story also ended well: Elaine, who arrived first, just walked into the campground and they gave her a cabin with two beds at a reduced rate.

This mix-up about accommodations was pretty much the only noteworthy event of the day. Other than running into Ross, an Englishman who is walking from London to Rome. When he came along I was standing talking to two people out for a stroll in the park just before Seraucourt. They stopped me to ask where I was coming from, where I was going, what the name of the route was... they had walked the Camino de Santiago from Le Puy, the most common starting point for people crazy enough to want to walk all the way across France before they walk all the way across Spain. They were really excited to hear about the Via Francigena and interested in doing it, and they asked me if there was a guidebook, so I gave them mine. My French one, I mean. I had ordered the Topoguide to the GR145/ Via Francigena before the English-language guide published by Cicerone came out, and because I really like the maps in the series, published by the French Fédération Gran Randonnée. But I have hardly been using it, as the Cicerone guidebook and the GPS track have been enough. So I gave it away - Volume 1 ends in Reims anyway, only  a few more days away.

I then walked the rest of the way into Seraucourt with Ross, where we parted ways as he was going further today. In Seraucourt I also met two Dutch walkers who are cycling to Rome and walking to Canterbury  - at the same time! How are they managing this? By an ingenious method: they first ride their bicycles southward, to the end of the day's walking stage, then lock them up, leave them there and walk back to the beginning of the stage, where their camper van is parked. They then drive the van back southward to where their bicycles are, cook their dinner and sleep in the van before repeating the procedure for the next stage on the following day. Thus doing away entirely with the need to search for accommodations that takes up so much time and energy. Ingenious! Only the Dutch could come up with such a scheme! 😄

Tonight's accommodations: Gîte Municipal in Seraucourt-le-Grand, très rustique but free!

Trefcon - Seraucourt-le-Grand 20 km (without passing through Saint Quentin)

Road to Home 2023 Day 17: Péronne- Trefcon

There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.

― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

On this walk I have been experiencing pain on the soles of my feet - a problem I have never had on Long Walks before. It's taken me 16 days to realise why! Normally, when I buy a new pair of boots, I immediately take out the insoles that come with them and replace them with Noene shock-absorbing insoles. I neglected to do this with my new boots (same variety as the previous two pairs - Scarpa Tellus). Noene insoles are quite costly and I had always wondered whether they were really worth the additional expense. Well now I can tell you they are! Over the past few days, whenever I stopped to take a break, the first few steps afterwards have been tough. As I get warmed up again the pain disappears, but it takes about ten minutes!

Once I realised that I hadn't got my special insoles in my shoes, it really started to bother me. There was a abundance of pharmacies in Péronne - three in the main square alone - so my mission for the morning was to find a pair of shock-absorbing insoles.  The first pharmacy didn't have any, but the second had Dr. Scholl's. They cost only a third of the price of Noene insoles, so I'm not sure they will be as effective, but I'll give them a try!

My second mission was to mail off a small package at the post office. This was also accomplished by 9:30 - opening time of the Historial Museum of the Great War. With only 17.5 km to walk today - according to the book - I decided I had plenty of time to take in the museum before leaving town. The exhibits investigate the causes and the consequences of the war, as well as the Battle of the Somme; I was particularly impressed by a half-hour of original video footage from the time, though I only understood about a quarter of the French commentary, and by the final room showing Otto Dix's Der Krieg collection of engravings.

I returned to the Auberge des Remparts to collect my backpack and left the city of Péronne behind. Next stop - the menhir in Doingt! Having be raised on a steady diet of Asterix and Obelix, I love menhirs and am quite willing to walk a few hundred metres out of my way to see one. On the way to this menhir was another treat - a bridge over a chalk stream! Chalk streams arise from springs in areas with chalk bedrock, which makes them particularly clear, with little organic matter or sediment, and ideal for the growth of acquatic plants. Nearly all of the world's 224 chalk streams are located in the UK; the rest are in northern France. This one is called the Cologne, a tributary of the Somme, which is itself a chalk stream on a grander scale!

The Doingt menhir is a block of sandstone four metres high, with a base buried two and a half metres into the ground, and is estimated to weigh 20 tonnes. It was brought here between three and four thousand years ago from the Rocogne woods, 1.6 kilometres away. How? By sliding it, on trunks of wood, in the winter over snow and ice. Why? Nobody knows.

After this brief detour the trail plunged into the woods, heading dead straight ahead along a former railroad track and emerging into the village of Cartigny. Here I caught up with Roy and Sue, an Australian couple I had met at breakfast in the hostel. Though they were not wearing their backpacks at breakfast, I instantly recognised them as fellow walkers by the way they were dressed. They had also spent the morning at the museum, but left ahead of me, so they were just finishing their lunches as I arrived at the grassy spot in front of the mairie. Shortly after they left, another walker came along and sat down on the bench. Patrick, from Dorset, is walking to Reims, where he will take a train to Le Puy to begin walking to Santiago. He is walking with a Canadian from Alberta, Elaine. But Elaine had fallen behind and so I didn't meet her until we reached our accommodations for the evening, several fields and forest paths later. There is only one place to stay in Trefcon, so we're all here! Val Domignon has various levels of accommodations, private rooms as well as a shared apartment with basic kitchen facilities. Pilgrims from both sides gathered in the kitchen to put together something for dinner with what we had in our backpacks, as there are no shops in this little village. For me that meant soup mix, salad and a hard-boiled egg. The others were very impressed that I even had tiny little bottles of olive oil and vinegar!

Today's accommodations: Chambres d'hôtes Val Domignon . They raise cart horses, offer riding lessons and organise kayaking expeditions on the Somme here, as well as providing basic accommodations for pilgrims on the Via Francigena. 

Péronne - Trefcon 22 km 

(including one minor diversion to see the menhir and another made by mistake 😄)

Road to Home 2023 Day 16: Froissy - Péronne

There was only one Road; it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.

- J.R.R. Tolkien,  The Lord of the Rings

I chose today's quote for three reasons: firstly and most obviously, because I have spent the day following a great river, the Somme; secondly, because my path, the Gran Randonnée de Pays Bataille de la Somme, is a tributary taking me back to the Via Francigena, into which it flows; and thirdly, because J.R.R. Tolkien himself fought in the Battle of the Somme, on the very same battlefields as my great-grandfather.

The protagonist of today's stage was no longer the battlefields and cemeteries but the River Somme itself, and especially the Canal de la Somme beside it.

The locks at Froissy 

My lodgings above the crêperie in Froissy

The 156 kilometre long Canal de la Somme was built between 1770 and 1843 for shipping purposes, but is now used only by pleasure boats. The section downstream of Péronne has silted up and has been closed to navigation since 2005. On this May 1 labour day holiday it was mainly being used by fishermen, some of whom appeared to be camping out by the canal for the weekend. 

Most of today's walk was along the bicycle path beside the canal, with the river beyond it on the other side, visible occasionally through the trees. I did not make the detour to climb up to the viewpoint at Frise as the morning was misty and I didn't think I would be able to see very far; besides, I had only just come back down to the canal after leaving it at Cappy to walk on a grassy path through the fields, soaking my boots and the bottom of my trousers with dew!

Typical Picardy house with decorative brickwork in Cappy

Cappy

Old school with separate boys' and girls' entrances

Field of rapeseed outside Cappy

Misty morning, wet boots

The path alternated between following the canal and cutting through the fields all the way to Péronne, where I left the canal at a small harbour, crossed the canal - which becomes part of the Canal du Nord here - and walked past the gardens along the bank of the river to my hostel in the ramparts of the old town, the Auberge des Remparts. After taking a shower and a break, washing my hiking clothes and hanging them up to dry in the wind and sunshine of the open window of my room, I ventured out to see the town.

The road into Péronne 

The town hall in the Grande Place

Few towns have been destroyed and rebuilt as many times as Péronne, a city epitomising key events in the history of France. Burned and pillaged in the time of the Normans, it was gravely damaged under Spanish occupation, devastated by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, totally destroyed in 1917 and rebuilt after the war only to be bombarded and burned by the German airforce in May 1940. The city of Péronne has been awarded two Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'honneur for all its troubles!

Outside the church is a monument to Marie Foure, a local heroine who led the town's defence against Charles V of Austria in 1536, saving it from destruction at least on that occasion!

The castle, with sections destroyed in WW I bricked in

But most remarkably of all, Péronne is home to a Carrefour supermarket that is open on May 1st! In the afternoon, no less! So I purchased some ready-made cannelloni and all the ingredients to make the remaining half of yesterday's head of lettuce into a gigantic salad: an avocado, beetroot, and eggs to hard-boil for tonight and for tomorrow's lunch. As well as fruit and pudding! Back at the Auberge des Remparts, I devoured my meal with no competition for the use of the kitchen. It's a sort of ghost hostel: nobody seems to be here. Not even at the reception desk - check-in is fully automated. I received an email with a code to open the front door and the number of a locker in the reception area in which I would find my room key card. Lights eerily switch on and off with a life of their own as I proceed along the hallway, and no-one is in the common room or the kitchen. I'm sure I'll sleep well, it's so quiet! I just hope that someone will be there to make my breakfast in the morning!

Today's accommodations: Auberge des Remparts

Froissy  - Péronne 26 km