Lovely dinner Friday evening with Hèlene (Normandie), Dorothea (Ireland), plus David and me. Dorothy is older than 80, so she has her bags forwarded from stage to stage and tends to forego gîtes in favor of hotels. We had dinner at her hotel and lovely conversation (in French and English) that lasted well into the evening.
Our proprietress, Anne, was a fount of words, very outgoing and full of information. We took advantage of her offer to do our laundry.
There were three people in our room. The third person was a French man from Poitiers, who had injured a tendon in his leg and could not continue walking. He also could not return home because of the train strike! How sad for him. We haven’t heard much positive comment about the strike from French people we’ve met. Consensus seems to be that SNCF has been mismanaged (hundreds of millions of Euros in debt), and that the reforms Macron has called for are necessary and appropriate.
Estaing, where we are staying, is the home of former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The family château dominates the view of the city as one approaches from the pilgrim way and crosses the Lot over the old bridge into the city.