The Thirteenth Day

Day13 was to be an easy day after our 35Km yesterday. We planned on doing 15 km from a drop off point  to Vaunaveys la Rochette. Our kind host, Bernard had traced out our route for us on our map, what could go wrong?

We spent the morning catching up on things, first of all we had discovered a hole in Gigi's boot which was getting worse, so we decided to try fixing it with epoxy resin, she would wear Flurry's boot that George had repaired the day before, and Flurry would continue to wear the spare boot we had.  I needed to book some accommodation for next week, when we will be moving to the Morvan. There were emails to be caught up on, so we had a fairly relaxed morning doing all this and no one seemed to be rushed. Then we realised that George thought we were riding out from the gite, while we had planned boxing part of the way and then riding to our destination, so suddenly it was panic stations.  We hadn't ordered a picnic, George hadn't reorganised the horse box as he thought we wouldn't be using it, so we were a bit later leaving the gite than we had planned, but it was only a short hack, right ?

So we were dropped off the other side of Crest at Aouste sur Sye really close to the horse trail, Martine started Everyrtrail and off we went. The terrain here was easier as we were away from the big mountains.

More ochre cliffs in the distance

But in the distance we could see there was fresh snow on the mountains.

The trail was quite narrow in places and steep and stony, but there were plenty of markers or "ballisage"  along the way.

Finally we came out onto the road again, and were just approaching a small village, when one of Flurry's boots came off for no apparent reason. Off we hopped, and did the adjustment. Then George phoned, he had arrived the gite but they had no reservation for us. The night before alarm bells had gone off in the back of my head when Vaunevays was mentioned but I was too tired to process them. But now I remembered, Vaunevays had been fully booked so I had picked somewhere much further away as the only viable option! So after quick consultations with George to arrange a pickup and a phone call to the gite to say we would be late, we started walking back to Crest along the road, until we found this welcome sight !

The next gite was a good bit outside Barbières called La Ferme du Pejoux. It was very isolated, but we were offered the usual warm welcome, and our host and hostess shared our celebratory bottle of Champagne. Despite all the errors of the day, we had reached the halfway mark, 250 kilometres! 

There is no Everytrail map for today , as for some reason it didn't work properly, another gremlin on Day13 of our trip, but we think it was 11km - Martine checked Everytrail before it choked and it was at 10km before we walked about 1km on the road!