22 nov

Snow on the ground. This is the 22nd of november, this is the South of France. This is not what we bargained for.
We did realise Merlin did not come with floor heating. But we hadn’t realized the floor cooling, or floor freezing really, which is what we are dealing with.
Looking out of our windows this morning we realised the wet snow from last night had not disappeared. It had kept on snowing and, because the temperature was above 0 (32) the melting snow on the leaves of the tree we were hiding under sounded like they had gotten into a hideous attack on us. Snow reaching a freezing soil, not happy camping circumstances.
The cold rising up from thr floor was the real problem. But I was able to disguise the circumstances, staying in bed. I had gotten through five chapters of The Last Vote, a fascinating book about the problems of democracy, but then it was 10 o’clock and time to rise to the occasion.
I spent a few hours looking at acceptable camping places for the next weeks, my goodness it feels like a waste of time, but it is really my side of the bargain with Julie and, in a way, the tedious research of discovering the few little mistakes in our camper guide and campground guide make these meanderings around the www worthwhile, in a way.
Looked up and it was 1.30 pm, my feet were freezing and I was hungry. La grandmere of Knorr made us an acceptable (Julie’s word’s) tomato soup and of we went to Rocamadour. If you’ve never been there, forget about it. If you want to go there, don’t. It is a trap. We walked through one of the Ports off the town. In english it was promising us this was a buzzing town, but al we saw were shops that said ‘fermee annuelle’, which really means ‘closed whenever we want to’.
On the way I saw my first Pilgrim, I asked Julie, “How do you call a guy like this, walking to Compostella” and this was her answer, including a mind boggling: ‘Ding Ding Ding,do I get a hundred dollars – which she won’t, because I have used the word pilgrim too often before.
Rocamodour, it had a nice little chapel with one of those amazing black Madonna’s with child that we have been seeing ever since we went to Montserrat. There was a guy who was pretending to be praying, but really preventing me to make pictures ( aren’t there a lot of letters similar in police and pious, ah well three, but it sounds similar).
It was a lovely sculpture and I couldn’t figure out why there were all these ships hanging in the chapel, even the modern organ of the main church had the base shape of a ship.
Ah well, on the way back we decided to head towards some better weather again. Suffering is something that might get the best out of people, but we always like to think it is getting the best out of people that are different from us.