Letting go, moving on

It is Sunday night, or actually 3:30am on Monday morning. There'll be no sleep for me tonight. Not a good way to start out a long pilgrimage but it is what it is. We have been visiting for the last three days and enjoying the luxury of being wined and dined and treated with amazing generosity by my son and his wife. But now it's time to let go again. It was so hard to leave home and leave my wonderful daughter and my grand daughter behind - as well as the dozens of things I wish I had done. And now again I have to let go of the warmth and affection in my son's house. Let go and move on. If we're going to do this it's time.

Tomorrow morning we catch the train at 6:43. Our train trip from Nice to Le Puy-en-Velay will take about 7 hours. We have to change trains in Lyon. We're scheduled to get to Le Puy about 2:30. When we arrive we will go to the albergue to drop off our backpacks, then go to an informal meeting of friends of the camino who will provide us with our 'credencials' , a kind of pilgrims' passport we need for staying in the albergues. An alternative would be to get them at the cathedral in the morning. But since we're not Catholic, that seems a bit cheeky.

I was pleased that we able to buy our train tickets using only French. I stumbled through but the woman understood me! I got the impression from what she said that she thought she should be trying to speak English but was very relieved to be able to speak in French. At least that's what I understood - or maybe she said 'oh man you stupid dolt, couldn't you have learned to speak half decent French before you came here?'  But I choose to believe she said something more like the former :) So we have our tickets and will be off in a couple of hours. Enough sitting around and eating too much, drinking wine and eating chocolate. We ate the most exquisite dessert on top of everything else tonight - brioche Tropeziene. I'm not sure of the spelling but it was a wonderful light cake thing filled with some kind of creamy custard. Very delicious!

Here's the backpack loaded up and ready to go. It weighs about 20 pounds so I hope I can get ruthless and ditch a few things.