The tourist information office in Arras is quite exquisite. It is in the Hotel de Ville, those special buildings you find in most larger towns, with their gorgeous architecture and a tall bell tower that can be seen from afar even at times before you see the church. In my experience you have to hang in there with the info. officer and don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, especially in France when asking anything to do with the Via Francigena, the track we are walking.
Eventually someone will know something and then when they help you, like Juliet did, there is no holding back. She rang the president of the VF association, who then rang around in tomorrow’s destination for accommodation, and eventually put us in contact with a Chambre d’ hote.
The track was too long for us today – anywhere near 30kms is a real struggle. So we walked our usual 20ish kms mark, rang our hostess on arriving at the appointed church rendezvous, and she picked us up (to cover the ‘we would have died’ distance).
By the way, the walk was superb today; it began with our shiver walk to breakfast. The May 1 day girl was frozen at her table selling flowers to give to a loved one, while the Boulangerie girl was so very excited about having her photo taken she nearly jumped over the counter. As we left, the reported heavy rain didn’t join us, but our ‘just in case’ rain gear shielded us from the strong blow. Open fields reached to the horizon as their wind turbines made use of the abundance of gusting fuel to ensure that the local villages could see, cook and warm themselves cheaply.
Along more of those high, narrow, tree-lined ridges (that used to carry trains but now keep walkers off colourful fields and offer protection from all the elements), across small roads, then winding along grass tracks, it was hard to notice the kms go by. There were villages to dawdle through, benches to rest awhile, next to no traffic, but many WW1 and WW2 cementaries to move us into a different kind of reflective mode.
In this part of France the churches are locked. I’m not sure why, and we don’t use them much, but often they can be a delight, offering a rain or wind haven, a seat and a place just to be.
But the real place to be right now is with Odile, who has just given us afternoon tea, shared her family stories, and is going to ensure we cover one of those ‘deadly’ distances tomorrow. She will drive us out from here a few kms so we can make the seemingly impossible, possible.