April 20: At La Puy

La Puy is a truly lovely town: the perfect start to our (anyone’s) camino. We arrived around lunchtime, with a half-day before check-in at our accommodation. It was actually nice to walk around all day with our packs on, a good preparation for the days to come. We started with a “café très allongé” (which was still very short, to American eyes) from the kiosk in the square with the bus terminus. We sat beside the substantial fountain and among the pigeons and jackdaws (I love jackdaws!). It was rather still a little brisk, but nice in the sun.

We decided to find the start of the camino, so as to be ready for tomorrow. This was an inspired idea and really gave us a feel for the ancient parts of the town. Wending your way through cobbled streets; following the camino blazes up seemingly-endless steps, you emerge at the Cathedrale de Notre Dame du Puy, high up on an outcrop of rock above the town. Exploring even higher and further, you reach the garden of “Our Lady of France”, a giant statue of the Virgin and Child that towers 23m high (plinth plus statue) atop a 132m high basalt “neck” formation, rising from the valley floor. The view was spectacular. You look down upon the Cathedral, which somehow overhangs the pinnacle on which it is built. Its terracotta-coloured cloister, geometric and Romanesque, seems suspended. The Byzantine church, with its octagonal dome, black-and-white edged semicircular arches and decorative brick work, speaks of its deep history and much loving, modern attention.

The Cathedral has parts dating from the 5th Century (its baptistry), parts of frescoes dating from the 13th Century. It was built as a giant reliquary, for one of the “Black Mary” icons, so beloved of the Middle Ages and was/is a place of pilgrimage in its own right, as well as a waypoint on the way to Santiago.

Inside, I had a lovely pray, feeling it a moment of gratitude, preparation and, in a way, grief. I found myself naming all my dead and reciting prayer requests for hurt and troubled friends and friends-of-friends. But, it was a good naming.: purposeful, almost an unloading – leaving them with God as we step off into this journey. May it be so.

We still had an hour for the stroll back down into the old town, where we found another café, for another coffee (this one served with home made candies which were very good). We sat and sipped in the Garden of Henri Vinay, an expansive and beautifully-tended park, with sandy avenues of plain trees, in budding leaf; a Zen garden of raked surfaces, rocks and clipped evergreens; a not-horrible animal collection, involving the most ostentatious chicken grotto (and I do mean “grotto”); an exhausted looking wallaby, snoozing in the shade and a pair of particularly short-legged goats who seemed to be passing the time blowing raspberries at each other with their puffy pink tongues.

Time just flew by!