Vast

Quinzième jour - Wednesday 1st July, Aire-sur-l’Adour - Miramont-Sensecq - 20.7 klms (running total approx 275.1)

Having left Aire-sur-l’Adour on what seemed to be an endless uphill climb, as I wondered and wandered through the morning I thought that I'd find nothing to write about. There was a same sameness to the landscape which didn't lead to great inspiration.

But then, surprise surprise, two things popped up.

The first is the agricultural landscape itself. It's changed a lot in the 2 weeks since we set out from Cahors. We spent today wandering through vast cornfields, interspersed with soybean fields, sunflowers (obviously) and less commonly the occasional cereal. The production itself wasn't surprising, but the supporting infrastructure is. For some days now we've seen evidence of what must be a very significant subterranean irrigation network. The huge overhead sprayers are supported by what must be a very high pressure/high flow system which is unseen other than when the machines connect to them. The various crops look incredibly healthy, and I can't imagine that they'd be so without that infrastructure, which must have cost a fortune to install and then to maintain.

This guy was sort of scarifying his soy bean crop. Whatever he was doing didn't quite make sense to me, but he was doing it very systematically

The other thing, which became a bit more obvious as we got closer to Miramont-Sensecq, tonight's stop-over point, was the number of sort of "river-stone" buildings. I say "sort of" because that's just a guess on my part. They look ancient and solid. At first I thought that they were only used for farm sheds and the like, but on closer observation there are houses and commercial buildings.

This last one, which is a shed, has a further story; more shortly.

These random thoughts, the walk was pretty uneventful, apart from the crazy woman who appeared to speed up as she got closer to us, and gave us the finger as she flew by!! Almost everyone else - the vast majority - be they ordinary drivers or tractor drivers/farm workers, slow down and give us a smile and/or friendly wave 👋.

Along with random thoughts comes random photos. Here are a few:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/7ecab3_a3029efc0275482093b3d9fb6d45d101/file

Which brings me back to the last of the building photos. Here's a close up of the building on the left in that photo:

It's our digs for the night, owned by the delightful Clothilde. The inscription above the front door shows:

In Roman numerals and directly above the door, the date 1863. Under the Roman numerals, 1742. Clothilde tells me the property is 250 years old. So whichever way you do the maths, the place is grand. Some inside photos:

Dining room

Until tomorrow ...