Day 15 - Paris to St Jean Pied De Port

No Photos for a while. The computers we are using do not come equipped with the necesary ports. So check backlogged entries periodically - when we get a computer with a USB port, they will be flooded with pics!

Also, because the spell-checker is in the native language of whatever country we are in, it does no good. Expect creative spelling too.

We managed to catch a morning train that wound south and west from Paris to Bayonne, and there made a connection with the local train that ws to take us to St Jean. Luckily the tracks were close to one another and that the Paris train was not delayed because we had 10 minutes to make the connection! Nearly all the other passangers on the Pied De Port train seemed to be Pilgrims: a motley crew of French, Germans, and Americans. I think I might have heard some Russian spoken too, but I can´t be sure. In Pied de Port, we ran into more people from more corners of the world... China, Japan, Hungary, but the vast majority seemed to be French or German. One girl from Munich actually knew someone who had started the Pilgrimmage from their front door in Germany! (The trail runs all over Europe, not just through Spain and France.)

At Pied De Port we got our Pilgrims´Passport and both elevation maps and a map for the next day´s hike. We stayed at a refugio, a shelter for pilgrims, for which we needed to present our Pilgrims Pass. This one was owned by a somewhat crazy, but altogether charming lady who rents out her top floor bedrooms to Pilgrims. Her house was a mess of dogs, cats, chickens, and tired travellers. We wound up sharing the room with, among others, a mother-daughter team from CA that we met on the train. Since we were all novices, we decided to team up for the first day´s hike. Turns out the mother breeds and shows dogs, and the daughter is off to Ghana to take a year abroad...Just two of many Chaucerian charaters one can expect to meet on a pilgrimmage...