Rainy Sunday morning

June 1, 2014

“I Will Lift You Up”

We have made friends with two pilgrims, one from Holland, Danielle (age 22) and Pierre ( age 30 something) from France. We met them at the Pilgrims office as we were sitting there waiting for our clothes to dry. They have been walking now for 7 weeks. They both started further up in France. Anyway, Danielle has a fungus in her boots due to the constant rain. Both have knee and feet issues.

We sat and talked and I told them where we planned to stay the next night as we were not going back to Banshee French woman’s place. We all decided to stay together for the next 2 nights at this wonderful, absolutely beautiful donativo ( donation) called Kaserna at 43 Rue d’ Espagne. The place is ran by Catholic volunteers who have all been on the Camino and come back to serve for 2 weeks on their vacation time. The people are friendly, sweet, nice, pleasant, helpful. Our meals ( breakfast and dinner) are cooked by them. The meal…oh…delicious! For 15€ a person this is a wonderful place to stay. We had a great evening listening to all converse in French, and then translated to us in English.

The French language is beautiful. You could be calling me a fat cow, softly speaking and I wouldn’t know it and it would sound nice. When one yells in French, there is no better language to be chewed out in…it still sounds beautiful…though the tone of anger leaves no disguise as to the anger.

Abby is feeling a lot better. We both took a 3 hour nap before dinner. We had spent the day meandering around St. Jean Pied de Port looking the village over. The architecture is amazing. The cobble stone roads worn smooth over the thousands of years of use are beautiful. It is everything that you imagine France should look like in the country. Green fields and hills doted with white sheep and yellow cows and black& white heirloom pigs ( there is a whole shop in town dedicated only to their meat!).

We are glad that plans changed and we stayed here to rest these past three days. We will go to mass inside this beautiful chapel this morning. We didn’t locate a LDS service, but we look forward to listening to mass in Basque language. It will be an adventure.

My backpack will be picked up on Monday to be taken to Orisson and it will be picked up to be taken on to Roncesvalles on Tuesday by Express Bourricot.
It is all working out.