Despite the inconvenience of being nearly 1km out of town, our stay in Nasbinals was really enjoyable. The hotel was clean and quiet (despite being right next to the road into town), we had a nice couple of pre-dinner drinks at the sister hotel in town and a very nice dinner before walking back to our room. To top it off, Nasbinals is a really lovely little old town with a nice church and town hall (Mairie is French for town hall).
After a much quieter breakfast than yesterday, we set off about 8:30am into town, where we bought some quiches for lunch, and made good headway for the first 9 or 10 kms to the village Aubrac (Aubrac is both the name of this tiny village and the greater region, hence the name Aubrac appearing in many of the towns we are visiting!), where we stopped for a coffee around 11am. The track was really good underfoot, sealed and dirt roads for a while then really nice tracks through farmland. You can see a few “burons” in the photos – these are the huts that shepherds used to stay in for the summer while the herds and flocks were up on the plateau. You can also see that in this section the trail was really busy – for the first couple of days we thought the trail was fairly quiet, but now we are starting to pick up groups that either missed the first two stages or are bussed in to walk maybe 10kms of the best sections then head off to another section.
Just prior to Aubrac we passed the highest point on our walk, 1368m, which was not much higher than Nasbinals (at 1180m, the highest town we will stay at). We also passed from the department of Lozère to Aveyron.
After Aubrac, the track changed as we descended about 500m over nearly 8kms. For most of the way rain had scoured the earth away leaving a very rocky path: the steeper the path, the rockier and more difficult it had become.
We stopped about half way down at Belvézet to eat our quiches and used our chairs for the first time and were very happy to have had them with us! We also spotted (actually, smelled!) a tank that we think the farmer used to create the fertiliser that the famous “shit machines” use – you can see that the cow dung comes straight out of the barn floor, water presumably is added and pumped back up to his machine. Too bad for the neighbours!
We were very happy to get in to St Chèly about 2pm, more leg weary than we thought we would be for a shortish day – just under 18kms today so I’m rounding down to 145kms in total.
steelewalking 
Hi guys, perhaps the shit throwing machine is to keep the walkers off his property.
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