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20 September 2026 - Livinhac-le-Haut

I was up and broke camp by the chapel before dawn. The way was mostly flat and mostly roads through fields. After about an hour I stopped at a nice little private rest area with eau potable and a dry toilet. Slowly the roads descended through the fields, and I was glad to be doing this section in the cool of the morning rather than the heat of the day. Eventually the roads reach Decazeville, which is a town of shops and restaurants and provided me with coffee for the morning. I stopped in one of the small betting shops which is open even on Sundays with a café, bar, and big screen TVs with horseraces. It amazes me that men gather at these places to bet on the horseraces, but I suppose that's their social life in this small town. In a boulangerie I also picked up the reserve sandwich for the day before heading out of town.

Livinhac-le-Haut is another town on the Lot river and from Decazeville there's a decent hill to get over. Along the way is St. Roch, where I stopped to lay on the cold stone of the church floor and put my swollen feet up to rest a bit from the heat. Then it was on down the hill to Livinhac-le-Haut. It was here that I finally found a place to swim in the cool river and enjoy my sandwich and beer on the riverbank. Then I walked up to the town to spend the hot hours at a café reading. Sadly there was no grocer open and no place to get a sandwich because it was Sunday. So I opted to still around until 7PM when the café served dinner. Days like these I am definitely not a fan of the 7PM dinner thing. But I got a lot of reading done. After wolfing down a cheeseburger I headed out and tried to get some evening distance in. It was not to be though. While the nearly full moon provided plenty of light, my stomach was not letting me go without frequent stops. Was it the cheeseburger? I only managed 18 kilometers for the day, painfully aware that I needed to average 26 for the rest of the days to make it to Moissac.