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The last post saw we three hikers – me, brother Tom and his wife Carol – finally getting up and over Mont Lozère and on to Le Pont-de-Montvert. (French for “Greenhill Bridge.”)

There we took our blessed second – and last – day off, before reaching the end of our hike at St. Jean du Gard. As for the hike “up and over,” the top of Mont Lozere offered some stunning vistas. Up there the summit was flat as a table – wide open and normally “exposed to fierce sunshine and biting winds” – and also filled with tall pillars of rocks. (But no bushes or trees – and no animal life either.) On the plus side, the winds that day weren’t actually that bad. In fact it was so pleasant up there that we “dawdled at the summit.”

The hike down from that mountaintop experience was another story. As I wrote later, “The longest day so far, 10 hours on the Trail, a full 12 miles. Some bad-ass rocky paths, especially near the end when you’re good and tired.” But we finally made it up and over Mont Lozere, then down to Montvert, sore feet, sore back and all. Put another way, “After 10 hours on the Trail each rocky foot-step hurt like hell. Back hurt, feet hurt, not fun.” But after a hot shower, fresh clothes and three beers (with salad), “things looked better.” Or as I put it next day (the late afternoon of our day off), and after lunch at Cafe Le Commerce again, shown at the top of the page:

Yesterday at the end of the hike down from Lozere I was cussing up a storm, mentally. But now, at the end of a long, sweet day off from hiking, relaxed, well fed, two beers for lunch, my hiking companions upstairs, napping, not so bad.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After “dragging tail” into town, showering and freshening up, we went looking for a quick and good meal. We found it at the Cafe right across the mid-town bridge from our apartment in the Quartier de la Moline shown on Google Maps. (Our spreadsheet called the place La Maison de Voyageurs, but it doesn’t seem to have a website. But you can glimpse it among the row of buildings peeking through the trees in that top photo.)

The main part of the apartment had two floors and two bedrooms, both upstairs. So far on the hike we’d been taking turns getting the good rooms, and now it was my turn to get the “bedroom” downstairs. (A pullout couch in the kitchen area. Carol got the master room with the big bed and Tom got the room with bunk beds.) Unfortunately the bathroom was also upstairs, which made for some agony later on, waiting for it to “open up for business.” (Par for the course for a guy who likes his beer as much as I do. Plus three “older folk?”) To get upstairs you had to climb some narrow squeeky-squawky stairs. The place also had a washer and dryer – and getting a dryer at your lodging is rare on a Camino – but they were in the basement. To get to it you had to go outside, into the street and then down through a separate locked door.

But the fresh-clean clothes made a big difference, as did a saunter through town next morning, The Tarn (river) cuts right through the middle of town, over many a rock and boulder:

Protected on both sides by steep ridges, Le Pont-de-Montvert straddles the banks of the River Tarn as it meanders along the valley floor. The village is one of the prettiest towns along the GR70 Chemin de Stevenson, and is the perfect spot to spend a lazy afternoon relaxing in a café near the river.

We followed that leisurely stroll with lunch at the same cafe we had dinner the night before. (I had the plat du jour and two beers.) Later that afternoon I figured to “yoga my ass off” (as Tom put it), to loosen up sore muscles. Plus I could look forward “to Carol’s touch-of-home spaghetti tonight for dinner.” As for the weather, it stayed chilly, as it had been most of the trip.

I’ve been cold most of the day. It was warm outside, for lunch in the sun, but inside, windows closed it’s cool, very cool, especially since my white sweatshirt is in the wash. At 5:00 p.m. [I wrote later] the day of rest stretches on. My feet are icy but I’ve done some good indoor exercises, yoga, ab crunches and such. Read some, wrote some.

To explain that 5:00 p.m. “icy feet,” we actually did two loads of laundry, which was quite a luxury. I saved the white sweatshirt for the second, afternoon load. But even though my feet were cold I could still snuggle under some covers and do some reflecting. Some written notes:

Impressions? Not like Stevenson’s trip, thank God. (No camping per se.) Some smooth trail but way too much rocky stuff. Twist and bend, achy feet, loss of balance. The hiking staff I found on the trail helps a lot, especially those rocky places and/or going downhill, feet jammed up into the toes of your shoes. So what am I discovering? Hiking with a pack, heavy, in a foreign land? Not being able to converse (easily) with the locals? Being cut off from normal everyday conversation. Learning to deal with unfamiliar, trying circumstances. A new bed every night. A new shower configuration too. Moments of pure beauty and bliss? Hours of walking, often on hostile paths, but at the end a feeling of accomplishment. And looking ahead to new challenges, “Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow.”

A lot of that sounded like complaining, but maybe it was more venting, expressing negative emotions “such as anger, frustration, etc.” And maybe it was cathartic, “involving the release of strong emotions,” as through writing them out? But let’s start with the top of the list.

A hike on the GR 70 today is way different than what Stevenson went through. No camping outdoors, no donkey to poke and prod, not to mention feed and care for. For another thing there really is a trail for modern hikers, but that wasn’t at all true in 1878. For  RLS most of the trip was hiking “cross-country,” picking his way through thick forests, up and down mountains, with nothing to guide him but his compass, and even that was subject to anomalies. (Like the part where he ran across the “impudent sly sluts,” when his compass didn’t work, he couldn’t find a place to stay and had to set up camp late at night, in the dark and in the wind, rain and hail.)

But strangely enough, the day we were to leave Monvert we were about to get a glimpse of the same kind of hike Stevenson went through. As noted in the last post, one challenge Tom faced on our day off was trying to figure out how “to bypass that big-ass Florac loop, and short-cut down to St. Julien.” (South of Montvert the Trail cuts way west to Florac, then cuts back way east down to St. Julien, with the net effect that you have to “pay for the same real estate twice.”)

How that turned out is a story for next time. Meanwhile – and a bit of foretaste – here’s a view of Pont du Montvert, like what we saw looking back down on our Friday-morning climb. Getting up that high we averaged 1.2 hiking miles per hour. And that was just the start of our day…

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The upper image is courtesy of Walking the GR70 Chemin de Stevenson – I Love Walking In France. The caption is from the website itself, along with this: “Le Pont-de-Montvert is one of the prettiest towns along the Chemin de Stevenson and the perfect spot for a lazy afternoon relaxing in a café near the river.” (A side note: The website has lots of good pictures of sites along the GR-70.)

According to French-English dictionary | English translation | Reverso, the term quartier translates to “district” or “area.” On Google Maps the term is abbreviated “Qur.”

Re “Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow.” One site said this speech by Macbeth signifies how your days stretch out, “each one the same as the one before … tediously, until the end of history.” And the individual – a poor actor or “walking shadow” – simply goes through the motions of life, “and then bows out [from] a story told by an idiot, full of noise and passion, but meaningless.” (Macbeth Soliloquy.) But I was using the phrase in an ironic sense, “the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.”

Re: “Pay for the same real estate twice.” As noted in Leaving Cheylard, on to St. Etienne, that referred to General Patton’s not wanting to “to fall back and regroup” during the Battle of the Bulge. See Not me. I don’t like to pay for the same real estate twice.

As to my sentiments about taking a shortcut to bypass the Florac loop, compared to the hike down from Mont Lozere,, I said “I hope it doesn’t involve more rocky [bleep]ing trails. I’ve had more than enough of those yesterday, sore-footing it into Pont de Montvert.” (And I included the “[bleep]” in the original, since this is a family-value blog.)

The lower image is courtesy of GR-70 Up From Pont De Montvert – Image Results.

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