Domaine de Sauvage to Bigose

April 5th -Well- what a surprise! We woke up to about 10-12 cm of snow this morning and it's still snowing! A couple of people with just trail shoes were quite upset. Mother Nature is such an uncooperative wench. It was very cold but quite pretty in the snow. Our two young female friends from Nantes are delighted so it perked me right up to see them so happy. We set off walking up through the forest with barb wire on both sides again, and enjoyed  the shapes of the trees which are so different from the ones at home - smaller but strong and shapely with nice 'bones'.

It is very cold today although blessedly not windy. I have on my silk long johns, top and bottom, regular, light pants and rain pants, three light woolen merino wool sweaters, a wool hat and over all of that my Altus rain poncho. In spite of the cold I felt reasonably cozy and warm.  Even our feet, with light woolen socks and Salamon hiking boots are warm enough.

Although the day was again quite rocky underfoot it was a pleasant change to have the mud frozen and really no water to walk through. This was a day where the overall trend was downhill, except for about 100 metres uphill but it was our first day of actually meeting a goal of walking 21.5 km so it felt like a long day for us.

We eventually reached Les Granges de Bigose - a spot that seemed to have little else but a brand new gîte apparently built in 2009. I had several email conversations with Benoit the owner as we had postponed our reservation so wasn't sure if he would be feeling exasperated with us. As it turns out however, he was very gracious and even spoke to us partly in English- a first if I recall correctly.

We entered the building directly into a large, warm dining room although we we immediately rushed to the basement to take off our boots and leave our packs - again the bedbug scare. We weren't allowed to take our packs up to the room but bins were provided for us to carry anything we wanted to carry up. Warm showers and clean clothes were very welcome!

Dinner was served at 7:00 and it was here we had our first aligot - a traditional dish of this region. It is mashed potatoes with a really gooey, tasty cheese beat into it and in this case was baked with a big curl of homemade sausage. Very delicious but very rich. A lovely homemade blueberry ice cream for dessert - more like gelato actually. And not to forget the hors d'oeuvre - a pâté of some kind of meat (not liver) with bread made a yummy start to it all. A great place to stay. The rooms were warm and pleasant in spite of again being airless. Breakfast was a treat as well as it included yogurt and fresh fruit with the usual bread and confiture and huge bowls of cafe au lait yes bowls! Morning coffee, tea or hot chocolate seems to be generally served in bowls in this part of the world. The bowls easily hold the equivalent of two cups.