Today was 10 miles, bringing our total to 351 miles.
The village of Condom is located on the Gers river. 
The Gers river, like the Lot river, flows into the Garonne river (path between the seas). Also, like the Garonne and the Lot rivers, you can charter a river cruising boat for several days through several weeks on this river.
Today’s walk was noteworthy for three reasons: A bit more forest coverage. 
The emergence of grapes (along with the sunflowers) as a cultivated product. 
And thirdly, for a bit of a lessening of Diane’s shin pains (so far, so good) 😃.
So, signal to noise, robustness and French.
The French language sounds beautiful when spoken by a capable speaker. Likewise, their cuisine is amazing … and precise. Doing both right requires a high signal to noise ratio (the ratio of what you intended to communicate versus the background noise, or background mess). You want that intricate food dish to look just right and not like a “plop on a plate”. High “signal to noise”. Similarly, you want the French words to sound “just so”, and not like something you just coughed (perhaps a bit like English)
To accommodate our English speaking lack of precision, the English language is pretty robust. You can pronounce it in a whole bunch of unintended ways (accents) and the message. .. pretty much it still gets across. Net, the English language is “robust”, which fits our less precise nature.
The French language, on the contrary, is rather precise (less robust) in keeping with their great sense of the aesthetic.
The challenge comes in when a native English speaker attempts to learn and speak French! That person (Bill and Diane) attempt to say things in French, having the American language sense of robustness. It doesn’t go so well!
This morning, we attempted to say “cours”, meaning ‘course’. All our hosts could hear was “cœur”, meaning ‘heart’. For us non- robust communicators, we couldn’t (for the life of us) hear the difference! After 15 minutes of hilarious efforts, we thought we understood, sort of.
We are learning that learning French is a whole lot more than learning a bunch of words. We’ll keep plugging at it. Being able to talk about life, and things, to a local French in their language more than justifies the effort
Au revoir!