This post was written on May 9th but not posted until May 10th due to lack of internet connections.
Breakfast was light at Chez Regine. In fact it was very light. Regine does not seem to believe in serving breakfast, so I was left to take a small bottle of orange juice from the fridge. It meant I would have to stop somewhere on the route to have a proper meal.
It was raining when I started out, so the raingear was on initially. In practice the rain soon dwindled away to a mist that seemed to condense on everything. The first few kilometers were through woodland, but then it was out onto the wilderness of the Aubrac plateau. The landscape there is reminiscent of the west of Ireland: Bare, bleak, and in its own way beautiful. The hills are grass covered, and what fields that there are are strewn with rocks, just like in the west of Ireland. The stone walls between the fields and the track, or between different fields are the same dry stone construction that one finds all over the west of Ireland.
But I have rarely if ever seen a west of Ireland landscape so rich in flora as the Aubrac was today. There were whole fields of daffodils and narcisii. It seems late for them, but I guess that spring comes late in the Aubrac. Well, it is between 1100 and 1300 metres above sea level. But I was also surprised to see orchids. There were some that resemble the early purple types that one sees in Ireland, but some of the others were completely new to me.
Here were few villages on the section of the route. Rieutort and Montgros were the only significant ones before coming to Nasbinals. Again, I guess that is testimony to the bleak sparsely populated landscape that it does not support so many villages. Anyway, I reached Nasbinals, and by now I was hungry. At a restaurant, I ordered “Salade Aubrac” which turned out to be a massive concoction of lettuce, ham tomatoes, egg and cheese. It was very tasty, and the helping was large enough to fill the void from not having a proper breakfast. Then it was time to do the touristic stuff and visit the church.
With that done, it was time to leave town. The route out of Nasbinals goes through forestry initially, before going on out onto the open mountainside.
The trail across the mountainside seemed to go on forever. Again it was reminiscent of routes in Ireland that traverse mountainsides.
But at last it turned and headed directly into the village of Aubrac itself. I arrived in the ist, with a lot of the structures barely visible until I was right at them. I am not sure whether this counts as a town or a village, but based on size I will call it a village. I checked in at the gite, which in this case is a square medieval tower. I have had a good dinner of soup, pork in a delicious sauce, and a kind of blancmange dessert. It was delicious, and I am ready now to sleep and face tomorrow.
And today’s step count was 40295
Walkingman 