Day 21 Moissac to Auvillar

Overall a really good day today! We got up bright and early ready for breakfast at 7:00am to beat the heat, only to find out that, on Saturday, breakfast starts at 8:00am. At the very moment that receptionist told us this, a (as it turned out, very) brief rain shower cane through so we grabbed our ponchos out of our suitcases and sat down for an hour of checking our iPhones!

We had a very nice breakfast, though, and set off for Auvillar at around about 8:30am not really knowing what to expect since, for the first time, we were going to follow the river for a long way, or more specifically the Canal de deux Mers. As the name suggests, it connects the Atlantic with the Mediterranean and, at least for the part we followed, the towpath (Chemin de halage) is also the the bikepath between the two seas or oceans.

The canal follows the Tarn river for a while, before the Garonne and Tarn join, after which it follows the Garonne and then, as the Garonne turns south towards Auvillar, it follows the canal Golftech, which is the canal that feeds the cooling water system for the Golftech nuclear power station!

Anyway, we followed it for about 15km, mostly in the shade provided by some very old and massive plane trees someone must have planted a few centuries ago.

We stopped for a short break at Maulause for a coffee and a couple of tarts we had bought at the boulangerie across the road from the bar about 8kms into the walk and spotted a bunch of canal boats that didn’t look like they’d moved for a decade or two!

Another 7kms down the canal, the trail crosses to the north of it, goes through a town, Pommevic, and then returns to the south side again. We thought we’d be clever and stay on the south side but when we came to the bridge we could get to it from that side, so had to go about 200m further downstream, cross to the north across a lock and backtrack to the bridge!

We’d been walking almost exclusively in shade until this point but once we crossed the bridge we had 3km a full sun across the broad river valley to Espalais, where we had a brief rest, then across the Garonne and the first, last and only climb for the day up to Auvillar.

Auvillar is a lovely, historic, town but unfortunately everything (or just about everything – we managed to get a sparkling mineral water at the art gallery cafe) was closed, including our hotel! I managed to work out the sign said call if you have a reservation and, as it turned out, our key was waiting for us up on the first floor and we made it to our room. Booked dinner across the road at Le Petit Palais and the bar of our hotel finally opened at 4:30pm so all good. The Eagles won and we had a great walk – what else can you ask for?

21kms today but some of it was backtracking so I’m saying 440kms in total so far. Hoping for a cool morning tomorrow🥶