Day 8 Espalion to Golinhac

Very long day today – further and more difficult than either guide book appears to indicate!

We started off very well – a gentle km walk into town from our B&B and then lovely views and a great walk along the Lot. You can see the seats and picnic tables in one of the photos – these were plentiful early on and non existent when needed…

Not far out of Espalion we headed inland, checking out the Eglise de Saint-Pierre-de-Besséjouls, one of the oldest churches on the route, dating back to the 11th century.

After the eglise the trail turned steeply uphill and we climbed about 150 up over a bit less than a kilometre to pop out on a sealed track – not long after that I took a photo of the Chateau you could see from our bedroom window now disappearing into the distance. Another descent down into Tredou, where we stopped by the church to eat our quiche and some raspberries we had bought in Espalion – we are sitting next to the World War One memorial for the village, every little town has one and they are pretty full of names given the size of the village!

Half an hour later we stopped again at Verrières and had a coffee – not making much progress as Al’s foot had started to hurt. She put her ankle brace on in Verrières and after that we started making better progress albeit still with some fairly sizeable ups and downs.

We were rewarded half an hour further on with the beautiful village of Estaing – we crossed the bridge to take a look but decided to head on further to what turned out to be a non-existent bar/restaurant 7.3 kms ahead. After just over 3kms on a nice easy path along the Lot, we turned uphill again, this time climbing 300m over 2.4km on a very steep path (I’ve added the altitude readout from my watch to show the climb)!

We rested for a fair while at a rest stop near where we thought the top was, again using our chairs, and ate one of our power bars and drank plenty of water from the tap at the stop. There were two walkers there when we arrived and 5 more arrived while we were resting, I don’t think any of them were expecting such a climb!

We left the rest stop about 3pm still nearly 7kms from our destination, Golinhac. Although the views were fantastic, we were stuffed – we stopped once more at Massip on some logs before trudging the final 2km into our accomodation, which is right next to the church but thankfully is right on the trail😀.

30kms by my watch today and 199km in total – think I’ll have a beer 🍺