Walking the Camino de Santiago
My new book, Practical Pilgrimage, is now available for purchase. Subtitled “Useful Rules for Walking the Camino de Santiago”, it’s a deeper exploration and expansion of a blog post that appeared back in 2023, Thom’s Practical Rules for the Camino. Purchase on Amazon (affiliate link)Purchase from Powell’s Books (preferred)Purchase at Barnes & Noble This short book (about a hundred pages) […]
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I arrived at the church of Saint-Adrien in Livinhac-le-Haut at about 3:45 in the afternoon. I decided to visit the church before finding a gîte. The main door was locked up tight. I found my way in through a small side door with an accessibility ramp. It was uncharacteristically hot and stuffy inside. This is particularly odd, considering how cool it […]
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After the bridge, I found myself walking down this windy, narrow street with the rather grand name of Rue de la République. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I passed several gîtes that are located down even narrower side streets to the left and right. I followed the blazes, hopeful that they would lead me to the church […]
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The Camino enters Livinhac-le-Haut on this bridge over our old friend, the River Lot. The bridge is mostly for car traffic, obviously, and pilgrims must walk a narrow sidewalk. Not my favourite thing in the world, but also nowhere close to the first time I’ve had to do something like this. I did not have a gîte reserved here, so […]
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When I finally caught sight of the town of Livinhac-le-Haut, I would have leapt for joy if I thought my feet would take it. It had been a long, long afternoon by the time I took this photo at about 3:30. I could hardly wait to find a gîte. The town of Livinhac-le-Haut is surrounded on three sides by the […]
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Throughout the Camino in France, I found many small roadside shrines like this one of Saint-Roch. It’s not the sort of thing you will see in the United States, and I always found them charming and, on some days, a source of needed inspiration. The Camino at this point was starting its descent to the river town of Livinhac-le-Haut, where […]
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Both to get out of the heat and to pray and rest a bit, I stopped in the chapel of Saint-Roch in the once-a-village-now-a-neighbourhood of Saint-Roch. This place was definitely a parish church once, or at least it very much gave the appearance of a place that had once seen much use and was now only sporadically attended to. There […]
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By this point, my feet were aching from all the roadwalking, and it was 2:30 in the afternoon and approaching the hottest part of the day, which admittedly wasn’t so bad today. And for some reason, the Camino just kept going uphill. The houses got farther and farther apart, and also larger and larger, until they finally stopped altogether. And […]
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After walking through the city of Decazeville, it was up a stupendously steep street and into one last quasi-rural neighborhood. The view from here over the city below was something. I had to pause a moment to catch my breath. Date: 28 August 2023 Place: leaving Decazeville, Aveyron Département, Region of Occitanie, France Maps!
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The Camino runs through the edge of the city of Decazeville, and while the guidebooks tend to paint this as a giant urban blight, I disagree. While I wouldn’t exactly call it charming, it has nothing like the awful endless rows of towering apartment blocks you get in cities like Lugo or Burgos. I walked through several neighborhoods, some nicer […]
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