Day 35: Mont-de-Marsan

8 km. Sun and Cloud, 20°

Alas Poor Yorick, I Hardly Knew You!🥾🥾

We woke to a bright sunny morning and faced the day just a little slower than usual. It was nice to linger over a cup of tea while catching up on a few world events. I haven’t been following the latest saga south of our Canadian border, but I was happy to read that Trump was convicted on ALL charges. A happy beginning!

Last evening we went out in search of a bistro or restaurant to have dinner. Along the way we decided to stop for a drink before dinner.

We happen to stop at an outdoor bar in the main square which had a big TV screen showing a game from the French Open.

We started watching and began to reminisce about the various football games that we’ve watched in bars such as this during our many walks and travels in Europe. It brought back a lot of really great memories, so we decided to order appie snacks from the bar. We ordered a second beer and called the whole thing dinner.😋

It was a great way to spend the evening, watching a little tennis and the French culture flow around us. A favourite pastime when we are away. For some reason, this isn’t as popular in Canada, and it’s probably because we don’t have these sorts of open squares surrounded by bars and restaurants. Mores the shame.

Once we were up and moving this morning, we decided it was time to look for a little bit of breakfast.

We found some! Annemarie seemed to be enjoying her coffee, and I was definitely enjoying my pan aux raisin!

I had a suspicion as we were walking into town yesterday that there might be an open market on today. There was!

It operated both inside undercover and outside. People had been flocking into town all morning, so the market was pretty busy. All the better from our perspective.

However, today’s main event was to deal with my rapidly deteriorating boots. Specifically their soles. My friend Hil gave me the same advice that I had given to her when she was having boot issues. Go look for new boots at Decathlon, a French sports equipment store. Having already walked out past the store a couple of days ago, she knew where it was located and passed along the information. We couldn’t wait until tomorrow to deal with this as we walked past because the store is closed on Sundays. This meant that we had to go out today, 4 km out, 4 km back.

The store was located in a large mall, and when we went in, a knowledgeable young guy showed me various shoe and boot options. He was very partial to a French brand that has leather uppers because he has wide feet and they fit him nicely. I don’t have wide feet and leather can take ages to properly break in. Besides, they had a shoe made by Salomon.😊

The shoe isn’t one that I would usually have selected, but it had real laces instead of the rapid pull laces and it had the new type of waterproofing. The distractions were that the new waterproofing isn’t as good as gore-Tex and there’s no stitching on the shoe. Also the sole pattern isn’t very aggressive. However, these shoes only have to get me another 135 km through whatever type of terrain presents and then home again. They should be adequate for that, and they are Salomon, a brand that I am very familiar with and that I know fits my foot well.

This was not the first time I’ve had to replace my footwear during a Camino. It happened the first time shortly after the beginning of our Walk For Alzheimer’s Awareness in 2018. That worked out really well, and I’ve no reason to expect anything different this time.

Boots purchased, we went outside and I replaced the old with the new.

I stripped the laces and the inserts from the old boots because they were better quality.

To help break them in, we walked back into the city centre where we had a good look around and a nice cold drink.

We are presently sitting in our nice apartment trying to figure out how to get home at the end of this walk. Numerous options are being considered, and we are deciding where to spend a few days before returning home. Stay tuned.

We were going to pull together a bunch of local specialties for dinner tonight, but we had so much fun last night in the square that we’re going to go back up there and watch a little more tennis and hopefully see the beginning of the Champions League football final between Real Madrid and Dortmund which is being played in London at Wembley Stadium this year. I know my buddy Ariel will be keenly watching the game at home.🍻

That’s about it from here. We are back on the trail tomorrow with six stages ahead of us until we reach Saint Jean Pied de Port. It will be fun to walk into there again. As my friend Neil said yesterday, we should begin to see the Pyrenees any time now. The weather forecast is for increasingly hot days through the week into the low 30s. Annemarie is less than impressed, but I’m pretty pleased. Rain is scheduled for next weekend. Ugh!

Bon Chemin!

Geoff🥾🥾🥾🥾🥾🥾