May 20: Feet Up in Aire-sur-l'Adour

We chilled today in Aire-sur-l’Adour. It’s quite a large town, and a traditional end to one of the Via Podiensis stages, but, obviously, hurting financially. A notable number of shops and businesses are for sale, or empty and for rent. The Covered Market is only operational on Friday and Saturday. The cathedral is under repair. Its interior is draped in tarpaulins and rings with hammering and chatting builders, but it is a fine building. The inside is painted with rich, muted trompe l’oeil tiling, swags, heraldry devices. The griffins and lions were expected, but the harpies and female centaurs (both in fetching blue-tones), were busty surprises.

We also took a stroll in the “river park”, which is a small nature reserve “set aside for the people of the commune”. It was a quiet meadow on a weekday morning, with a gravel pathway, which helped a lot because the mud is still lingering. However, tomorrow threatens to rise to 31 degrees by 4pm, so we can expect it to rapidly vanish as we go forward.

Our hotel has a pleasant terrace, where we snoozed this afternoon. They did our laundry for a small surcharge. The laundromat marked on GoogleMaps is actually a bank of 3 washers in the carpark of the Intermarché supermarket (like a laundry ATM, with the expectation of unloading your smalls onto the pavement). We were happy to give our hosts their extra 2 Euros.

Yesterday we walked almost 30km. We have 8 days to St Jean du Pieds de Ports, of which 2 are over 28km, including Friday, which is forecast to 33 degrees, so we took it slow today and made sure we stayed hydrated. In a surprise twist, we decided AGAINST dinner yesterday, and also today. The hotel had, in fact, made us a reservation at their other location. We had eaten a large picnic and, when we walked into the restaurant, it stank of old, over-cooked fish. They were really very concerned that we hadn’t used our voucher and questioned us closely this morning. We simply explained that we weren’t hungry and tried not to offend. Breakfast (served here) was excellent. We took full advantage.

Yesterday, I foraged a few wild strawberries, which were very sweet and had that unmistakeable smell (the French “fraises” comes from the Latin “fragrum”, which gives us “fragrance”). Carey refused, referring to them as “pee-height strawberries”, which covers ALL wild strawberries, so I won’t be offering again. I also picked some beautiful red cherries from a roadside tree, which Carey also declined. They were tart and delicious.

Both Carey and I were in our shocking pink t-shirts yesterday. We heard a couple of bikers refer to us as “team pink” as they sped past. They had passed us earlier, but cyclists get routed on much longer stages and they connected up with the footpath more than once. They clearly had nicknames for a lot of us walkers, “team pink” was among the most neutral, for which we were grateful.