Quatrième jour - Saturday 20th June, Moissac to Auvillar - 20.7 klms (running total approx 97.2) An unusual typographical day. Whilst the previous three days had total accents and descents in the 500/600 metre range (both ways), today’s was about 100m up and down. In other words we walked our 20 klms pretty-well dead flat all day. That was a real bonus in the circumstances. I can divide today’s narrative into three sections. Part one – exploring Moissac. The tourist highlight

Troisième jour - Friday 19th June, Lauzerte to Moissac - 29.8 klms (running total approx 76.4) There were many potential titles for today’s blog, but after an elapsed time of just under 10 hours on the road, of which Strava tells me that we were moving for 7 of them, I chose this one, for reasons which are probably clear enough. Before I go one, here's a link to show today's journey (and if one of my kind readers who does not use Strava can tell me whether the link actually w

Deuxième jour - Thursday 18th June - Lascabanes to Lauzette, 23.6 klms (running total approx 46.7) Beast is probably a bit harsh, even though the heat was rather beastly at times ... For reasons we can’t quite fathom, even though it was much the same distance as yesterday, today's journey took a good couple of hours longer in time, and that's with a bit of cheating 😀. As arranged Nathalie drove us back to Lascabanes around 8am and without much mucking around we hit the road.

Premier Jour - Cahors to Lascabanes, Wednesday 17th June 2026 - 23.1 klms Well, what a day. I think we’ve both done very well. But more of that later ... Before the day started, I had a plan as to what I was going to talk about today. But as regular readers of the blog will know, often – indeed usually – a theme emerges as I walk along. And today was no different. But before I get into today’s theme, let me briefly talk about that which I had planned to say. Today is a good

Monday, 15th June, somewhere in the southern French countryside. I'm writing this from on board a fast(ish) train from Paris to Cahors, where we will start our walk on the day after tomorrow. We're whizzing along at around 130 kph. We've passed bigger towns, pretty little villages - the one a moment ago had a Rapunzel-like castle, open fields with freshly rolled hay bales, little local roads wending their way through the trees, the occasional industrial site and lots of wind

The ever-increasing, exorbitant cost of airfares generally combined with our somewhat extravagant preference to undertake long-haul flights at the pointy end of the plane meant that we had to make some concessions. The concession was that rather than fly either direct to France or even our normal Perth-Singapore kick-off on Qantas, we chose the somewhat convoluted route of Perth-Kuala Lumpur-Bangkok on Malaysian to pick up Finnair to Helsinki and then onto Paris. The Finnair

I quite like being Australian (too bad if I didn't), although at times I don't like elements of modern Australia, which is another story for another day. It's good to be here and it's also good to leave occasionally. [As an aside, three years ago when we were walking the Via de la Plata I made an intentional and overt comment on a particular matter of Australian politics about which I was most bitterly disappointed; and was then fully bemused to have one of my readers post a

Sub-title: there's only so many years left I don't think that it's equivocation to keep one’s options open. My justification – if indeed that’s what it is – is that one can’t be certain what’s around the corner. With a few fundamental exceptions, locking yourself into a closed position may not necessarily be all that smart. That’s not to say that I’ve haven’t actually done it a few times – the most notable being when, in 2010, after an incredibly special trip to the Himalaya