Route – Via Podiensis/Camino Francés 2023

We walked a “long Camino” in the autumn of 2023. Unlike our previous pilgrimages, Francine embarked on a separate adventure. Thom headed for France.

He began in the French city of Le Puy-en-Velay. This route, known as the Via Podiensis, covers something like 740km before arriving in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, where it becomes the Camino Francés. Then it’s 800km in Spain. This adventure is about 66 days of walking, give or take.

The first section, the nine or ten days from Le Puy to Conques, is often described as the most beautiful trail in France. The guidebooks generally compare this stretch to the Camino Primitivo in terms of difficulty. There are a lot of elevation changes, as you’re basically walking out of a massive ancient volcanic caldera – up, up, up, and then steeply down. After that, it gets a lot flatter until you’re up the Pyrenees and into Spain after Saint-Jean. That part is wicked steep.

After Conques, both the crowds and difficult terrain thin out. The later, flatter sections of the route have been compared to a cross between the Shire and the Meseta in Spain, and like the Meseta it seems to be a place where it’s possible to do big kilometers a day.

I planned the stages of my route, both in France and Spain, in advance. Of course, no plan survives contact with the Camino, and the final route was a bit different, particularly towards the end. We had originally planned to walk in the Spring of 2024, with Francine joining me for the first ten days and then the last ten. But then life happened, and I suddenly found myself able to go much earlier. With Francine’s blessing – indeed, at her prompting – I walked alone. Just me and the thousands of other pilgrims walking the route.

Francine, meanwhile, served as an hospitalera in Logroño for the first half of September with our friend Becky, and then the two of them walked the Caminho Português from Porto.