Southwest France - to Pont St-Nicolas

The second day's walk began with a very hurried breakfast - Elisabeth doesn't serve it til 9:00 and the taxi was due at 9:30.

We are about to break our fast quickly, so as not to keep the taxi waiting.

Cannot keep waiting the taxi driver who took us to the "hameau" of Russan (a little hamlet, not even a village).  Dropped us off at the town square and delivered our suitcases to our home for the night. This day began with a steep hike up and out of the town and looking down at the Russan Bridge far far below. Oddly, there's water upstream of the bridge, but none downstream.  Apparently during dry spells, there's little water to feed the streams, and the river recedes underground.

The Russan Bridge and the disappearing Gardon River.

This day we walked and walked and walked, sometimes seeing the river below, sometimes the cliffs beneath our feet, and many times glimpsing the cliffs across the gorge. This is pretty dramatic country. The cliffs are quite high, and the landscape is what is called garrigue.

Typical of the Garrigue?  I think so, from what little I could understand.

I don't pretend to understand that word, but the trees are quite small (an oak tree had tiny leaves no bigger than my thumb).  Many of the shrubs have fairly tough and think leaves - kind of like thornless holly leaves.  In some places it was very stark, in others there were grasses, but in many places the garrigue predominated. The trail mostly followed one of the Grand Randonees (well-marked foot trails); this was the GR6 and GR63, with occasional forays along a Petit Randonee.  The GRs are marked by a white stripe above a red stripe, with the PR having a yellow stripe beneath the first two.

Easy to spot the waymarks down low on this scruffy little tree - typical of what we saw in the garrigue.

Cleverly, if the trail turned left, the bars would be underscored by an upsidedown L-shaped arrow pointing left; and vice versa if the trail turned right.  And best of all, if there was a junction with an unwanted or disused trail, the colors crossed in an X shape.

Enlightened Traveller had provided us with very good maps and summaries of each day's twists and turns. We learned to follow carefully the company's notes.  One particular viewpoint was noted in the area, high above a great meander in the waterless river.

This reminded us of a series of meanders on the Potomac River called the PawPaw Bends. 

 When we arrived at this viewpoint, we were not alone - a local man and his lovely Australian Shepherd dog were there. While we ate our lunch, doggie knew what was going on and visited each of us in turn, looking for a hand-out. She was also smart enough to lie down in our shadows, shielded from the sun's heat.

She's a beautiful, friendly but well behaved Australian Shepherd.

A short distance along we were passed by a hunter and his bird-dog.  Seems that bird hunting season had begun.  He wore an yellow cap and his dog an orange collar.

His English was even worse than my Frence.

The worst hiking ever for me had to have been the last kilometer or two before we reached the Pont St-Nicolas.  We were hiking along the high ridge above the gorge (not comfortable for one who doesn't like heights), and the footing is what Enlightened Traveller described as "classic denuded limestone causeway". We called it the swiss cheese rocks.

Take those rocks Pat is sitting on and imagine a long trail carved into it, with holes big enough to snare a toe or a heel. Walking on this stuff was slow, scary, and always with eyes alertly examining the trail.

The best part - rather, the only good part - of this section is the periodic sighting of the bridge in the distance. It was build in mid-13th century with a series of medieval arches.  Before it was built, crossing the Gardon in the rainy season required a long detour to the Pont du Gard but, according to our notes, crossing that over the highest tier was too narrow for mules. This day if there was water in the river, it was hidden by the trees on the right bank.

Actually, we drove across the bridge after our final walk.  We learned then that the great flood of September 2002 had washed out this bridge.  It is so important to transportation that it was quickly and exactly rebuilt.

The hike's end was anticlimactic - - we never got near to the bridge, never crossed it during any of our several days hikes.

The end of this day's hike took us out of the woods and along a local road to a crossroads where we were instructed to phone the owner of the gite for a ride.  But the phone had not been tested up to then for outgoing calls, and great frustration with the instructions was suffered.  Meanwhile, all we could do was sit in the hot sun and hope for relief.  Which came in the form of hiking couple returning to the parked car near to us.  I tried in broken French to explain that we could not call our host and needed some assistance.  What I hoped for was for him to make the phone call.  Instead he offered to drive us to Russan. Of course, we accepted.  Someone showed him the name of our destination; he saw it on a sign at the edge of town and drove us to the gate!!  What a good samaritan.  And we'll never know who he was.

The host is Marc, his wife is Isabelle, and the gite is called Gite des Figouriers, or the Gite of the fig tree owners.  Inside the courtyard is a huge big fig tree.  Made me wish Joe could have seen it.

The house is much larger than what this photo shows.  The rooms were above the two doors seen here, kind of a suite connected by a comfortable bathroom.

Our rooms were pretty comfortable, the dinner was very down-home:  melon with ham, great hot lasagna, and a fruit cup of figs and white peaches, all washed down with Rose wine - which may be a speciality of the region.

Our first course, with wine, of course.

Dessert was white peaches and figs.  I was too hungry to bother photographing the lasagna.

And the dinner was served to us by the owner's daughter, probably about 17 or 18. Maybe she's breaking into the business or maybe she needed to practice her English language skills, or maybe both.  She was very sweet.

This was such a quiet place.  Had there not been a bright light in the courtyard outside my window I'd have left the window open all night in hopes of seeing many stars.