Today was a beautiful walk, about half of which was on the River Lot. It was a 13 mile walk, bringing our total to 107 miles.

Leaving the medieval city of St. Côme requires our first of many crossings of the Lot river. 

From there, we climbed abruptly to an escarpment that overlooks both St. Côme and the next town along the way,  Espalion. We tried to capture the panoramic view with a video. Hopefully, this works:

On the descent down to the next village,  Espalion, we passed an ancient Persian church, dating back to the 10th century. 

Espalion was, yep, another beautiful village. Here are photos of the river with the town in the background.On arrival into Estaing, we were not disappointed. The village is considered one of the most beautiful in France and is the home of former French prime minister, Valery Giscard d’Estaing (note the “estaing” part of his name! )

Now, what’s this Frankly speaking thing? Well, from the onset of this journey, we have tried to use as much French as possible, to build our very modest skills here. What we have found is that many of the French people were met are much more fluent in English than we are in French.

In short order, they quickly direct the conversation to English. We suspect two possible reasons for this quick transition to English:

1. They feel so badly for us that they want to put us out of our misery as quickly as possible, or;

2. They are proud of the French language and can only suffer so much abuse of their native tongue before they must act … so they move us off of French!

Actually, when we talk them that we’re really do want to learn French and that we will only get better (hopefully) by practice, almost universally they become very helpful teachers of the French language. Very cool.

Enough for now. This is the second place in all of our Camino journeys that had a pool. We must partake!