Day 17 was a rest day – it rained most of the day, I stayed in my hotel room doing some bookkeeping on the internet and the blog, and lying prone listening to a tinny version of mozart trios on the phone, moving my legs as little as possible.
But today is another day and I’m ready to go.
The temperature has dropped to 4 degrees C officially. The wind-chill from the damp north wind must be sending it down to freezing.
Get to the hotel at 4 p.m. have a hot shower and go to bed for two hours to warm up.
Nice dinner, great half-bottle of Chablis, “La Sereinne”, good cheeseboard as ever. In the dining-room are posters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Because this is the country through which he travelled for his book “Travels with a Donkey”, it was written as kind of “Human Interest” journalism and dealt with his tribulations as an early “Backpacker” tourist and his discussions with locals about the Protestant/Catholic divide in the area. This area, the Cevennes, was a protestant stronghold in the 17th Century, against the French state in counter-reformation mode.
There was much bloodshed. RLS was interested in how the Catholics and Protestants got on together one hundred years after the fighting and terrorism had ended. People whose grandparents had murdered eachother now lived in peace together. (This followed an edict of Louis 14th who said the French state could now tolerate Protestants, unwelcome though they were).
He has much to say about religion, intolerance and man’s foolishness in general, as well as about the troublesome management of a donkey, but, after a day like mine today battling against a cold wind he offers this:
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future
Good night.