It’s 11 pm, so I’ll keep this short.
Today we hiked 14.4 miles (23 kms) in 5 hours/24 minutes from Cahors to Lascabanes, France. My watch says I took 31,232 steps, climbed the equivalent of 55 flights of stairs, and burned 2,031 calories.
The morning began as we crossed the Lot River on a mid-evil bridge. JP insisted that we get a picture.
Most of the stair count was achieved first thing in the morning, as we left Cahors, and ascended a massive cliff. The trail was almost straight up.
We were all huffing and puffing by the time we got to the top.
Stephen had promised that once we got to the top, it was going to be flat …. He lied. There were several inclines and declines to come.
At about 3 miles into our trek, we ran into a couple of hikers from Boise, Idaho. Ryan is an internal medicine doctor, who worked in Kentucky early in his career. And Lacey investigates child deaths for the state of Idaho. She came to France last week to learn how to make French breads. Now they are hiking the camino for a week.
We walked together for a bit and then stopped at a town to have a snack. Lacey told Stephen that she liked the camino shell he was carrying and asked where she could buy one. Stephen responded by immediately offering his shell to her, in a selfless act of generosity. There were tears all around.
Also during that brief stop, Lacey told us that the terrain we were seeing now was called “the long middle”. The explanation is that the environment is not particularly beautiful or particularly ugly. Its open fields are pastoral, but there are no unique features or aberrations.
While this is a way of describing territory, I think it can also be used to describe a stage of life. (Let me get philosophical for a moment.) As I reflect back on my mid-life, I recall many years where I fell into the routine of working hard, attending my son’s sports games, grilling ribs on the back deck, and playing cards with the neighbors. These things filled my daily life and I felt good about them. But there was nothing special or noteworthy about these years. They served to keep me feeling like I was moving forward and to provide a baseline to the times that my life was really unusual – like moving the family to the Philippines!
Thanks,Lacey, for introducing me to this concept making me think a little deeper than my usual.
Leave a comment