Saugues to Le Sauvage – 20 kms

Steps: 38391

We only planned on 12 kms today but it wasn’t to be.

We left our fantastic gite in Saugues, and backtracked into town to get supplies. Deux pain au chocolates, un baguette et salami. Sorted for the day.

Today we heard cuckoos as we staggered along. They may make a cool sound like a clock, but they are quite a selfish bird.

The cuckoo lady does it with the dude cuckoo, then lays her egg in someone else’s nest.

So one day Madame Blackbird is happily sitting on her eggs, excited about becoming a mum. Movement under her bum indicate her children are hatching.

They hatch and her children are beautiful. Except for one. The ugly ducking.

Even though Madame blackbird loves the ugly one as much as the others, she starts to panic.

‘Oh no,’ she thinks. ‘Monsieur Blackbird is going to know about my affair.’

But of course it was just the nasty cuckoo stirring things up, too lazy to look after her own children.

So next time you get excited about hearing a cuckoo, sister Susan, please think about the impact she has on the other bird families.

The other sounds of the day was the Eurofghter Typhon giving us a private airshow. There was too much cloud to see him all the time, but when we did it was pretty exciting, and amazing how the sound travelled for a good 5 seconds behind him.

We had planned to stop at the same gite that my sisters stayed at the previous night, but we arrived at 12.30 and they didn’t open until 2.30. So we continued on 8km to the next gite in Le Sauvage.

For the last kilometre it pissed down with rain and we were thankful to arrive to a nice warm bar.

We stayed in an old barn that had been converted to a gite. It was modern and clean. Our room was a dorm of six beds, all of which we had to ourselves.

Dinner was delicious. We sat at banquet tables with about 40 other walkers, all of them French. We had the most delicious pork and scalloped potatoes. Yum yum.