WHEN WALKING

Home to Santiago – Day 7

Saint-Cyr-la-Campagne to Évreux: 38km

I wake up at 6.30 after a great night’s sleep. Celine’s husband, whose name I will never know, is already up and sitting in the garden. The dogs bark in excitement when I appear. I’ve heard them sniffing around the tent already this morning. And soon Celine joins us.

Breakfast is all waiting. Pot of coffee, a bag of oats, which apparently is not meant for my breakfast. It’s for me to eat like a horse as I walk along. Jam-filled brioche to eat now.

We chat, or at least we try to. They’re very patient. The husband, who is either shy or just very nervous about speaking to someone who only does bad French, comes and sits with us and starts to join in. He’s been to England twice. He’s retraining to be a welder. He looks a little panicked as he realises he is going to have to explain ‘welder’ to me, but he does a great job. I want to tell him about my interest in metal turning, but decide that is a mime too far.

Celine works in the local school, but now it’s the holidays. With three kids and their five-person caravan, they’re driving off to Brittany for their holidays tomorrow. And still they took me in.

I can’t get quite get over Celine’s competence: three kids, a huge garden, which she’s watering by the time I leave, going on adventure days with her son carrying rucksacks bigger than mine, preparing to do a 100-kilometre day and night walk for Oxfam. She tells me that the cat I see is in fact three cats, all different, which explains the multiple personalities I’ve experienced since last night. She rescued them from the forest. I get a feeling she does a lot of rescuing.

We pose for a photograph, and I’m off.

And now, here I am, a few hours later, sitting on a shady bench in the bizarrely named Square Carrington, beside the most English-looking church I’ve seen so far. It’s all a mystery to me, and probably always will be.

It’s an unremarkable, pleasant little village on a plateau in Normandy, where I’ve been happily walking without too much effort, listening to podcasts about the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. You learn a lot on days like today.

I have a splendid lunch. I’m living off breakfast products today. There’s a bag of strawberry brioche, an assortment of pastilles, with the liquorice and eucalyptus-menthol ones removed. And then there’s Celine’s huge bag of oats. I’m wondering if I can tip them all into a big bowl of yoghurt later, or if I should fashion a nosebag.

My second stop is quite a long one, at three o’clock in the afternoon, sitting on the lawns of a tiny village’svmairie, eating more brioche. The heat of the day is at its strongest now, so I find shade on the other side of a hedge from a man watering his garden.

I take the opportunity to look at my itinerary and my budget hotel booked for this evening and realise that somehow I’m a day ahead of schedule. I’ve missed a stop somewhere. No wonder I’m tired. Hastily I cancel the hotel and, with what turns out to be an extraordinary piece of luck, manage to find an even cheaper Airbnb room in a townhouse in the centre of Evreux. Once I decide I can face the heat again, I set off.

I knew today would be a very bare and isolated day. I could tell that from the difficulties finding resources or accommodation when planning the route between Rouen and Dreux. But I’m enjoying the first of these two days. There’s not much to do but think, listen to podcasts and grab a quick bonjour whenever you can.

The landscape’s easy. It’s a flat chalk plateau, similar to back home, but here no tectonic movement pushed the chalk up to create chalk ridges and hills. The chalk has remained lying flat, and the only ascents and descents are into the wooded valleys which cut through it at intervals.

Just before heading up the wooded valley side for the last ascent before Evreux, I walk through a small village and think it’s a miracle as I see in front of me. A business seems to be open by the side of the road. And as I get closer, it’s the miracle of a boulangerie-pâtisserie, still open in the afternoon and selling ice-cold Orangina. The woman in the shop even has a stamp and shows interest in my walk.

This is enough to get me up the last hill. It takes me quite a lot to get across the last piece of plateau though. But mindgames, a few pretty sights to focus on, and a couple of shoes-off stops get me through. By the end of days like, the trekking poles are needed to keep me upright.

Finally I make it, at nine o’clock, into Evreux, where, after a quick shop, I meet up with Annick at her incredible house.

The house is exactly the type of palatial townhouse that I’ve been reading about all day. It’s her family home, but the children have gone away far and wide. Now she rents out two rooms, one through Airbnb, the other to students living in the town.

I find it hard to contain my amazement at the luck I have found. I have the run of this house, with paintings, chaise longues, leather sofas and a claw bath. Even my room is an old converted study with its own leather sofa, bookshelves and desk, complete with inkwells ready to fill. I wish I’d got here earlier.

I stay up late just enjoying my room, enjoying rather less the claw bath in which I shower and from which I discover I’m almost incapable of getting myself out. It’s been a very long day. I eat my boxed salad camping-style and decide that, however long tomorrow is, I’m having a lie-in.