Tuesday 17 July 2007

Prilgrimage from Cesnoa to Ivrea 16/07/07


I was feeling a lot better this morning but still had remnants of my sore throat. Lets hope it’s gone by tomorrow…

I left the campground by 08:00 expecting to walk the 12kms to Ivrea within around two hours. The walk was beautiful but it started to heat up earlier today as the mountains have almost disappeared and I was out of their shadow by 08:30. I took my first rest at 09:30 with 5kms still to go. I decided to see if I could get internet in the town I was in but was disappointed once again. I still spent almost an hour on the computer though, catching up on my blogs.

By the time I got to Irvea it was just past 11am but I couldn’t find a tourist information office anywhere. The tourist maps didn’t even mark it and nobody knew of one??? Very strange…

I also couldn’t find an internet café and probably walked another 3kms around town before locating one.

It was great though! They charged me €5 for as long as I wanted so I set up for the day. There has been heaps that I have been meaning to do but haven’t had the time to spend on it. Today was the day.

As you have probably noticed you can now track our trip on Google. This was a project I have wanted to do since the start. I have also started to add photos and will be going back and adding them soon.

The other major thing I wanted to do was start contacting people in www.couchsurfing.com. If you haven’t heard of this you should check it out…it’s really cool! I tried to contact a few people in France without success but today I have already had a reply back. This is a great way to get out of the “tourist bubble” while traveling :)

So I finally got the boot 6½ hours later when the shop was closing. It was time to try to find a parish.

As I was entering the cathedral a few of the workers were leaving so I hit them up for some local knowledge. As far as they were aware there wasn’t anyone who took in pilgrims in town but most stayed at the hostel.

Tracking this down was also a mission. The hostel wasn’t actually a hostel at all. I don’t know what it was but there were no signs to mark it out and they wanted €35 for the room. I will wild camp tonight I think.

This also made my mind up about waiting around for Dan. I was planning on giving him till tomorrow afternoon to get to town and I could spend another day on the net, but if I was going to walk out of town to camp I won’t be going back in tomorrow morning. Dan will have to catch up another day.

I would enjoy the company but I feel a bit lost if I don’t move far in a day…

On the edge of town I spotted a canal which had a walkway, I knew this would be perfect. Luckily, I didn’t have to follow it long before finding somewhere to camp…the mosquitoes were awesome! I haven’t been eaten like this in years!

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