Day 20 St Simplice to Moissac

A pretty nice day’s walking today, although it got hot towards the end as we walked through first the suburbs and then the light industrial area of Moissac before reaching our hotel (which is extremely nice!).

We’ve noticed a lot of things have changed over the last few days: I think the last cows we saw were around Bouziés, several days ago, the stone fences are disappearing and the houses are getting newer (obviously not so in Lauzerte, but no old stone houses at all today). We also seemed to have dropped out of the rolling hills that were a feature of today into a much wider river valley than we have been in so far…

A reasonably early breakfast today at 7:30am and our taxi was right on time at 8:15am but one of the really great things about a walking holiday is just that – walking into the hotel in the afternoon or evening and walking out again the next day. The hotel was nice enough but not good enough to justify the stuffing around and uncertainty around organising a taxi in a foreign language.

Anyway, we got walking just after 8:30am and gave ourselves a bit of a head start, knocking somewhere between 6 and 8kms off the day by starting in St Simplice, a small hamlet near where the track crossed a main road, instead of Lauzerte. After 400m we found the track and set off towards the village of Dufort-Lacapalette, which we reached in just over an hour. We had intended to buy our supplies for the day there, but the supermarket/bar/café was closed for renovation! Not a complete disaster but we knew there were no other places on today’s walk to buy any food🥵. Luckily we had some fruit we bought yesterday and a couple of protein bars!

So we pressed on from there, passing a lot of orchards – mostly apricot and nectarines – before eating our fruit at the church at St Martin, 3km down the track. The walking was pretty easy most of the way, mostly black top or nice path through oak forest, some steep uphill but not too bad. We had a second break to eat our protein bars at the top of the last big climb and stopped again about 1km further on, again at a church, the Chapelle d’Espis, before the final 5km or so into Moissac.

Moissac doesn’t seem to have much character – perhaps I’m wrong and we’ll see a different side tomorrow – but we are in a lovely hotel right on the Tarn river so no complaints! We had a couple of drinks before checking in and going to our room, which is huge and air conditioned!

22kms today and 420kms in total – looking forward to a rest day tomorrow, it’s going to be hot!