Saturday, October 30, 2010

Moissac to Toulouse Thu. Oct. 14, 2010


We have finished walking for this year and for this half of our Chemin Le Puy. We've walked half as far as last year, only about 420-450 kms, and for half as many days, only 17, but our bodies feel no different than when we finished the complete Camino Frances. We're tired and aching and mentally relieved to be done. At the same time it definitely feels unfinished. Part of being mentally and physically finished is because of our starting expectations. With limited time this year we had planned to walk only to Moissac and so that's what we were mentally geared up for, what we worked towards and anticipated. I'm sure if we had initially set out to end up in St. Jean Pied de Port we would have just put on our boots and packs again today at 7:30am and started walking.

As it was, we gave Julia our mefix, extra snacks, a whistle and our love and then we did put on our boots and packs at 7:30am but it was to head out and catch a bus. The potential train strike is now in fact an actuality so we needed to catch a bus. Julia walked us to the gare and we had a very tearful goodbye. She was desolate and we felt like deserters. It's amazing how well the three of us have fit together over the last eleven days. We been together pretty well 24/7 for that time. We've shared our fatigue, jokes, challenges, food, friendship, stories and sarcasm. A cutting example of the latter was when we were leaving Lauzerte and we passed Le Maison des Retraites and Julia pointed out, "Oh, Karen and Dayton, here's the gite you should have stayed at"! I thought it was a retreat but she informed me that it was a retirement home for us old folks.

As Julia headed out into the dark, we waited for the bus. We had to take a bus to Montaubon and then transfer to a train for Toulouse. Surprisingly, when we got to the train station there were conductors waving us quickly into and through the train station, across the tracks and onto the waiting train. So that part of our trip went okay. In Toulouse, it was a lot more confusing. Everyone was lining up at the ticket office to try to make arrangements to travel and no one really had any definite answers about which trains were still running or would be running the next day. I made the mistake of taking one clerk's advice and decided to wait until later in the day to see if the rapid trains were going to run. If I had just purchased tickets on the regular trains we could have gotten to Lyon via Montpelier in about three hours. As it was, by the time I purchased our tickets all those trains were completely sold out and we were lucky to get tickets for Lyon via Marseilles. The bad news was it was about eight hours on the train with a couple of hours layover in between; the good news - we would get a scenic train tour of the Mediterranean coast. Also the train travel was relatively comfortable and I had my ebook so quite content. I have to give a shout out to the ticket clerks. They kept their cool on what must have been an extremely hectic day. They helped one frantic traveller after another, fluctuating from French to English or Spanish or German and did everything they could to get people on trains to wherever they needed to go.

The strike was quite evident all around us in Toulouse. There were protests at the train station and riot police at the ready everywhere. When we got to our Hotel Victor Hugo, the concierge, a former pilgrim and kindred soul, commiserated with our train ticket woes and, almost proudly, stated that, while the French can't win a championship in football (soccer over here), they are the world champions of strikes. On our walking tour of Toulouse we passed a couple of schools, a lycee and an art school. French students are quite political and they were adding their demonstrations to the protest. The strike centers on proposed legislation which would raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 which isn't making anyone happy. Older workers resent having to work longer and students worry about the lack of jobs for the youth.

We just counted ourselves lucky that we could still get on any train and that we had a chance to get to Lyon in good time to catch our flight to return home. A few days later, we may not have been so fortunate.

By the way, I did get my McDonalds comfort fries at the Marseilles train station.

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