Noalinhac to Figeac

April 14 - We walked from Noalinhac which is at about 350 metres, up to 450 metres, back down to about 100 metres and back up again to something over 200 metres. We had not been able to find and open store to purchase lunch food and had not had breakfast so by the time we had done our ups and downs and covered almost 20 kilometres we were starving. We eventually arrived at Decazeville ready to eat a horse but we had huge tuna, eggs, tomato and lettuce salad instead. Boy it was good. Canadian women with our appetites are only satisfied with small amounts of nuts and dried fruit for so long! Starvation sets in long before one might ordinarily expect:)
So we detoured into Decazeville, an old mining town. This spot was once the sight of the largest opencast mining operation in Europe, although I don't know if it is still active. Certainly the dark scar  looms over the whole town revealing its past. We had planned to stay in Decazeville but because of an early start and a wonderful tuna salad for lunch we were feeling tired but reasonably good.

In spite of the good food, we didn't really like the feel of the part of Decazeville we were in and soon found ourselves headed uphill again. After 2 kilometres go going up a very steep hill, in the heat, on the pavement (as is all too common here in my opinion), we arrived at Saint-Roch which is a spot some historical importance. We were muttering back and forth about what the heck we were doing and noticed that we were standing, gasping, in front of a gîte. Suddenly an angel appeared in the window which he pushed wide open. He stood there with his arms spread wide open and said something cosmic like 'hey do you want some coffee?' Although I think it was in French. And as they say here 'do we want coffee? Is the pope Catholic?'

It turned out that our angel was an American named Ray (now known as our ray of sunshine or ray of hope depending on our mood) who was living in another part of France but doing a turn as a hospitalero at this gîte so the owner could take a break. As we discussed what we wanted to do it became evident that our bodies were still crying out for a rest day so we explored different options for doing that. In the end, we decided to go back to Decazeville and take a train to Figeac, which Ray had discovered we could still do that day. And bless his generous heart, he offered to drive us back down to the train station. So he did and we did. We hopped on the train for the small sum of 3.50€ and went to Figeac, reputed to have an interesting historic section, to have our rest day. And although we were a bit late in the day arriving, we were able to find places at the first spot we tried - Gîte Soleilho. There was only one other person there, an American woman, Linda, who I had actually had some email communication with before we left (thanks to Ivar's forum). All three of us had a quiet and very pleasant time there catching up on emails and washing.

I enjoyed being in the historic part of Figeac. The church is beautiful and, in particular, there is a small chapel for strangers to town to go into for prayer, meditation or just quiet time. It was lovely to look at and very peaceful. We ate dinner out at a restaurant the first night which was tasty but always too much and we decided to cook the second night. Linda, our American friend had some pasta and a bottle of pasta sauce which we added to by purchasing artichokes and sundried tomatoes at an Italian specialty foods shop and a sausage from the butcher. It was really tasty too  although we made far too much and ended up throwing quite a bit away. We did consider leaving it for another pilgrim but the general feeling was that most people would not eat food found in a frig cooked by someone unknown person at some unknown time - so out it went.