Monday: Marcilhac to Lauzarte

(Firstly apologies, I haven't had wifi to update for a while, and though I had been keeping a running log on my phone it has somehow been wiped so I will have to give an abbreviated version of the week.)

The proprietress presided over breakfast: coffee, old bread as it was Monday and four small pots on a turntable of the sort that comes with poppadoms in an Indian restaurant. We were asked to guess the flavours. One looked like honey but turned out to be syrup. The rest were all variations of courgette jam, the only thing to have grown in her garden. There were also courgette jam turnovers. My Swiss friends were less than impressed.

I enjoyed the company of this family and was sorry to cycle away. The weather was cool and gusty. I made my way up the Cele gorge back to the river Lot, and then on to Cahors. Cahors was a bit of a disappointment. The cathedral was a mess of different styles of which 19th neo-gothic predominated. The weather was the most changeable yet: 15minutes of hot sunshine alternating with a squally shower and a sudden drop in temperature. This made me decide against prolonging my stay an instead I decided to press on to Lauzerte, a beautiful hilltop town with a classic bastide arcaded town square.

I saw in the church that there was mass in the presbytery at 6pm. I needed all of the 10 minutes available to find the presbytery on the other side of town. I sat with three others and waited. At 6:15 the priest appeared. He was partially sighted, and now began to fill the most awkward cruets imaginable from a selection of plastic bottles lined up on a shelf behind the altar. As he did so he fired out questions to the three of us who were pilgrims: where have you come from today? I was tired and couldn't remember; where are you staying tonight? I had only just arrived and had not yet found a place, which intelligence made my fellow pilgrims palpably sick with concern. The priest was now finding his way into an alb, continuing a now muffled interrogation and oblivious to my incapacity to fully understand him.

Mass over, I found that the Gite d'Etape was full, as was one other. Finally the batman who deputized for the Tourist Info out of hours found that I could have an appartment on the square for €18! I accepted, fried up some onions to have with my leftover baguette and, exhausted, crashed to sleep before it was 9pm.

In the morning I bought bread from this charming boulangerie, where the baker gave me helpful directions, and cycled off to Moissac.