It was supposed to be a short day, but blindly following the red and white route directions took me 30km instead of the planned 22km.
I left the hotel on the outskirts of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume and walked into the town to visit the Cathedral, before following a quiet road towards Bras. The Cathedral is quite imposing, despite it never being finished as the town ran out of money before completion.
I passed a sign promoting the GR 653A Via Aurelia, the route I am currently following. The Cathedral was visible – when I looked backwards whilst walking – for many kilometers. The road was initially lined by houses and at at the very last house before a rural area, there was a very loud dog which I could hear bark for at least 15 minutes after I had passed by. Poor neighbours.
It was downhill into Bras, a seemingly typical Provencal village with a church, bar, tabac, a baker and a small supermarket. I met my wife and we took a coffee. My wife had met an American who apologised to her for the way America was acting in relation to Greenland, Denmark and Europe.
After Bras the route became more rural in nature. My wife, who had checked where I was via her iPhone, called and asked whether I wasn’t going in the wrong direction. At that point I wasn’t, but soon afterwards that all changed.
It was a beautiful scenery, green, small hills and lots of vines. I climbed slowly, ca. 100m over many kilometers, so nothing strenuous. Just after my wife’s call, the path was blocked by a gate and a fence in both directions. Instead of doing what I should have done, stopped up and checked my tracks on alltrails, I saw a red and white sign to me right and followed it along the fence. It wasn’t a small detour. I followed the fence south for a couple of kilometers along a narrow path. When the fence came to an end, I was way off my track and I realised that the red and white signs were for a different trail altogether. Checking my map, I could see that few meters before the gate, I had missed a turning that would have taken me 50m north (left of the gate) and I would have been following the path I was supposed to follow. The mistake cost me 8 kms.
The wrong path finally took me to the motorway along small paths through forest. As my destination, Brignoles, was next to the motorway, I thought that I would be able to follow the slip road. The plan worked for a kilometer or so, before the slip road was blocked by a service station, surrounded by barbed wire. As you pay a toll on French motorways, service stations are generally hermetically closed, so you can neither get in or out, neither vehicles or walkers.
I sat down and made a new plan to get back onto my original path, which involved some smaller climbs and small paths occasionally covered in water. I passed a quarry on the way – Brignoles was famous for marble, but it didn’t look like a marble quarry. It was a pleasant walk and there were some great views of the valley below where Brignoles could be seen in the distance.
With 3kms to go, I finally made it back onto the “right” path. It turned out that the right path was extremely wide and covered a gas pipe with high trees on both sides of the path. It was also up and down, with an extremely steep declines. So whilst it would have been substantially shorter to follow, I would not have seen anything other than trees and a wide stony path.
I found the hotel where my wife had already checked in, showered and we drove to the villages of Cotigac and Entrecasteaux.