Our Moveable Feats

August 26, 2024

Maps!

They’re declarations and invitations. All the great adventure books (and a few others) have thumb-worn prefaces teasing the discoveries to follow. There’s an intricate beauty to Michelin cartes touristiques with their enigma of icons, soft topographic shading and multicolour latticed routes. Like any modern art, stare long enough and it maybe, just, partly, starts to make sense…

Our excursion will take us west-southwest from Le Puy-en-Velay to Cahors, which, on the above map, at 1:1M scale, is ~ 35 cm/350 km. Our way criss-crosses 4 départements (like subregions of a province / state): Haute Loire, Lozère, Aveyron and le Lot.

It’s been awkward at times explaining where we’re going other than ‘Central France’, so, with a week to go, here’s a bit more detail:

22 days, 19 stops, with a few rest days, plying this necklace of obscure, quirkily-named hamlets… God willing

(we pre-pilgrims can say that now ;-))

So that’s the ‘where’ of it; the ‘why’ remains unsettled, as do we.