Day 4 Saint Alban-sur-Limagnole

Tuesday 20th September and another cold start with hoar frost, made colder  by the strong breeze coming down from the North.

Walking along easy forest tracks amongst the stands of Scots pine it is definitely mushroom season. Although Saugues is better known for mushrooms I see plenty today on the forest floor. Some of these are poisonous so please don't use this as a foragers guide.

The soundtrack for today is made up of the constant noise of cow bells tinkling and clunking all around making for a definite low alpine feel; today touched close to 1,300m.

I took a wrong turn and then used the mapy.cz app to see where I was and where I should be. I normally use komoot and today found out that the Jakobsweg (German) website has all the camino .GPX files to download. Mapy.cz just seems to work and has the GR65 in red and a blue (GPS) spot telling you where you. I was easily able to get back on track without a U-turn and it shows that it us useful to have the tools available and to practice using them.

There was a definite lack of cafés today so I was grateful for the gîte d'étape provided packed lunch. I did make use of an honesty café where you go in, make a hot drink and get a chocolate bar or biscuits and leave a donation. These are good spots as it brings the pilgrims together for a while.

The 500m of main road today coincided with a change of region and department from the Haut-Loire in Augergne Rhone-Alpes...
... to la Lozere in the Occitanie region.
Or, more pictorialy concise we can see the old school signage which helpfully validates my earlier altitude claim. 

This does highlight the general move to decentralised administration where everyone wants to out their own stamp on their patch.

I have mentioned the network of WCs and visited one today for purely research reasons. Without a water supply this one was a dry toilet with detailed instructions. In sharing my mushroom photos with an American later in the day she confessed to taking the same toilet photo. Yuck.
Staying with the real issues of the pilgrim road last night's gite d'étape had asked us to leave rucksacks in a storage room and just to rake essentials to the bedroom; they had had a  bedbug outbreak in July and were managing the risks. The process tonight is the same. As you pack light you generally need everything in your rucksack so you spend your time walking up and down the stairs to your rucksack. As walking distance and budget determine accommodation it is mo surprise that many of last nights pilgrims are here today so I am sharing with the same two men.

Finishing on a geographic and more travel worthy note this is where I am. I'll be following the white dashed line to Nasbinals via Aubrac.

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