Gacé to Sées – The Streets are Ours

It was over 17 miles today. Why Dave? Because I sacrificed a shorter distance for quiet country lanes. Take pleasure in walking the quiet country lanes of Normandy. No traffic so the streets are, indeed, ours.

It rained in the night. Luckily I had pitched my tiny tent under trees, and hedges. And it stored away in my rucksack this morning reasonably dry, in a bin bag.

I had been woken this morning by Hell’s Angels from Belgium, who arrived last night as I was going to bed. They had all the bikes, jackets and stuff but not the presence. As I walked past them one said to me that the weather was a disaster. It is, for bedwetters from Belgium matey, but it’s ok for Hell’s Trekkers from Yorkshire!

I become dogmatic, opinionated, peremptory, imperious, authoritarian, brilliant. Well the online thesaurus didn’t exactly show up ‘brilliant’ but if an idiot hadn’t written it then it would have.

I set off at 8am, thanks to the noisy Hell’s Wetbedders. And another dodgy bloke was looking at me! He was wearing a black skirt.

Oh dear.

I had two coffees and a pain au chocolat, then strutted down the road like an emboldened Captain Mainwaring, feeling good. It’s my seventh consecutive walking day and whilst the hills have been ‘rolling’ rather than ‘challenging’ I’ve covered some distance with my rucksack. I don’t ‘know’ why ‘I’ put inverted commas on ‘words’ but it doesn’t matter.

Walking out of Gace I spotted this little structure, redundant now in most places, an old communal clothes washing place. When we bought our house in Tassat in the late 1980s the local women (not the men) washed clothes in the stream at the bottom of our garden. Sorry, I just wanted to clarify that the men were not shirking any cleaning responsibilities, but organising important business matters. Talking about harvests and cows and manure. Stuff like that.

The real life inspiration for La Dame Aux Camelias, written by Alexander Dumas, was a girl called Alphonsine Plessis from an extremely poor family in Gace. Known as ‘Camille’ outside of France, the book was translated to a stage play by Dumas and into the opera, La Traviata, by Verdi.

My incredibly brilliant strategy of walking down country lanes paid off big time as I was able to walk down …….. country lanes.

Lots of them

I didn’t see anybody, until I started to have a pee in the middle of nowhere and a car with an old couple in came round the corner, resulting in me fumbling to put the old fellow prematurely away before their aged eyes could actually focus on Percy Tiddlecock. Which further resulted in a couple of kilometres of dampness in the underpant department until matters dried out satisfactorily.

I’m sorry, yes it’s crude and messy but it’s my responsibility as a blogger, and my necessary purpose as a serious writer, to bring all the sights, sounds, feelings and smells to the reader. So he or she can understand exactly the circumstances in which I find myself when trekking. Well, maybe I missed out on bringing you the smells. But nobody else did who came anywhere near me that day.

As punishment it started to rain and I struggled to get my waterproofs on me and the rucksack. In fact it was persistent. Until a break came along for a brief respite.

With only a pain au chocolat on board I began to feel peckish. An old gimmer came along, stopped his car and began collecting up these yellow plums, just like in my front garden. I got tucked in, they were sweet and delicious. He said he was collecting them to make jam. Good shout.

These fantastical pieces of sculptural history are largely hidden away now, with their 17th century horse and cart highways by-passed by time and traffic. Still a joy to the occasional, off the beaten track trekker.

Through the resumed rain I came upon Le Merlerault, a small village with a tiny bar and a huge town hall. How deluded are the local dignitaries, which probably consists of the mayor, his missus, his best mate and a goat? Why do they need this? But at least the rain showers were now few and far between.

I got a burger in the bar and then carried on. Refreshed and raring to get to Sées. And the country still felt great.

After another three hours of hard slog I caught a (magnified) glimpse of the thin towers of the Cathedral at Sées. When your muscles underneath your ribcage become unbearably uncomfortable from persistent rucksack carrying, and your repaired,but vulnerable, shoulder begins to call out for assistance, then the sight of your finishing post, however distant, is a tonic. I love commas.

These never fail to humble you.

Six young Canadian lads were flying over Sées dropping leaflets warning the local French civilians of imminent RAF raids on strategic targets so that they could get out of the way unhurt. But the lads’ plane caught some German flak and they crashed in the fields north of Sées, and all died.

I arrived in Sées. It is impressive, with a 13th century cathedral built on the site of three earlier churches.

I camped in the local municipal campsite and ate in the communal shed there, having bought shredded carrot, two slices of ham, a baguette, a small Charentais melon, local blue cheese and a bottle of local cider. Was it all truly wafted here from paradise?

Night night.