Today was 14 miles and 1,600′ of climbing. Totals are 95 miles hiked and 3,600′ climbed.
There are no photos today. 4 days ago, Bill used his phone to capture our hiking in the rain. The phone is still not happy. As such, the phone/camera remained in a plastic bag, out of the rain!
Rain? Here was the morning forecast.
We can testify that the day lived up to and exceeded the forecast! It rained a lot!
A qualifier about this rain. Yes, it rained a lot. But it was also serenely beautiful. Really. We were quite content with the walk … but we don’t wish to do it more than once or twice a decade!
Mud: All this rain onto old farm roads made massive amounts of mud! At times, our shoes were several pounds heavier carrying that excess mud weight! By the time we arrived at our stay for the night, most of it had washed off. The host kindly took our shoes and washed them. They are now sitting in front of a fireplace, drying!
Fog: When not pouring, the moisture settled in as fog, sometimes rather thick. As a good deal of today’s path was through rolling farmland and old tractor paths (with no regular method of trail marking), it was easy to get lost in the thick fog. Really, we needed to stay close enough to each other not to get lost from one another.
We used the Francigena trail app to track where we were versus the proper trail in order to stay on course.
The red DOT represents where we are, and the red line indicates where the proper trail was. Without using this , it would have been easy to get lost!
Flooding: Okay, with all this rain, you’d kind of expect some flooding, right? Well, we were within about 4 miles of the finish today and we’re thinking we were doing pretty well. Until we turned a corner on the trail and found a full-on raging stream crossing the trail. There was no possible way to safely ford that torrent!
We turned around and got back on a paved road that kind of went parallel to the path and walked on that. Eventually we found a bridge that crossed the stream and piecemealed a path back to our trail. All’s well that end’s well!
We arrived to a most gracious welcome here! And also, a very warm fireplace! Yes, sir.
All for now!