Last couple of days in Nice and I’ve caught up on a lot of stuff. I’m had two interviews for TFM Radio, am waiting a call from a reporter for the Evening Chronicle, have a lot of accommodation sorted courtesy of people on Couchsurfing.com and been to see The Simpsons movie, which utterly rocked. Make sure you stay right till the end of the credits!

This blog is pretty much as up to date as I can get it right now. I wish I had time to upload my photos but I simply haven’t enough hours with all the other things I need to do. Still a pile to work through, but most is done.

I will try to keep posting here. The 1000 Miles blog will mainly be used to just say where I am. All the fun I have, details of things I see and so will go on this one so do keep checking in.

OK, when I say “deprived me of the opportunity” I mean “saved my ass”. When we woke, it was to look down the valley and see the same bunch of kids wearing white pyjamas with black belts round the waist wailing crap out of each other.

Eep.

After showering (2 Euro each, but way cheaper than a room for the night) we packed up and wandered off on what was supposedly a downhill trek. Only we ended up going uphill. What was stranger was that the initially well-marked trail just vanished at one point. We followed crushed grass for ages – where someone else had obviously continued on – but came to a dead end. Eventually, we gave up looking, walked back down and took the road down to Saint Martin Visubie.

We got there in mid-afternoon – too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but just in time for the bus before the one we’d intended to catch. Hmm. Quick beer or back to the flat and a nice shower… For once, beer lost. This is very rare.

I can honestly say I had a great three days. I ended up tightening my belt another notch (I have no notches left and should really buy new trousers) but am more than pleased with myself for managing. My legs hurt but not too badly and my feet are fine despite being cooped in boots for three days. All very good signs.

I’ve learned a few things for the Walk – I don’t need as much stuff as I thought and I am damn well capable of doing it. Oh, and I hate sleeping in tents but the whole Walk isn’t about having fun, it’s about raising awareness and money.

More achey than breaky, thankfully.

Today was rather full-on. I still have no idea of the distance we walked as all the guidebooks Delphine has (indeed all the signs) are marked in hours and minutes, not kilometres. Suffice to say it was somewher between “a lot” and “a hell of a lot”, or so it seemed.

Worth every step though. Early on we stopped at a gîte for a Coke and a coffee where the owner took pity on us silly fools and gave us a box of matches as well. We chowed down on jam sandwiches and set off (uphill – it always seems to be uphill) and into the woods.

There’s not a lot to really write about today. We had lunch by a fast-flowing river in the bright sunshine while a French family splashed each other with freezing water. Clambered up mountain tracks. Sat with our feet in a lake until they went numb.

We even walked into Italy quite briefly. A small mountain pass with abandoned guardhouses on it from during the war. I assume to keep the French in rather than the Italians out judging by the side of the border they’re on. While up there we saw chamois, marmots and some birds I didn’t recognise. The marmots would let us get within maybe 20m of them, while we could get twice as close to the chamois before they scampered off up the seemingly vertical rock faces.

We reached another refuge / gîte around 7pm and had a beer before using their kitchen to cook up some spag bol. As we settled down later on, we could hear a group of kids downhill singing the same song over and over and over. I was tempted to go and kick them or steal their food or something but sleep deprived me of the opportunity.

The first proper day of our hike went well, though it was flipping hot. There are places to get water as you hike but often they’re few and far between. We found one after about 45 minutes but the trickle from the tap was so slow that a snail coughing in the next village would divert it’s flow.

Being a gentleman I let Delphine set the pace and go first. Also I could point and giggle each time she lost her footing. Which was usually about three seconds before I did the same thing.

We passed one refuge / shack near where we’d planned to stop for the night and were rapidly told that the area was “full” but one busybody man attempting to be polite. The fact that we were in the countryside on public land didn’t seem to be a fact he’d grasped but we decided we didn’t want to be near anyone like that anyway and that we’d just sneak down at 4am and steal their orange juice (we didn’t – we slept in).

Nearby we found a nice area with some steady rocks for us to light up the gas burner and cook dinner – ravioli. Yum! This was when we found that Delphine had picked up the wrong matchbox at home and we had only two matches on us. Uh-oh. Thankfully the first worked and we still had a spare. We cooked, washed, packed and headed uphill to the next flat area we could find… which was inundated with flies and mosquitoes making it nigh on impossible to concentrate on my Harry Potter novel as I spent longer squashing the damn things than reading.

We slept from darkness till slightly after dawn, woken only by the sound of wild pigs snuffling near the tent. At which point we waited for them to try and steal our luggage, but fortunately they must have had better quality stuff as they left it alone.