50 Days of Camino

Kevin Soltysiak's travel log of the way of St. James, the "Camino de Santiago"

Monlezun — Maubourguet

We left Monlezun as planned, around 7h, and walked in the fog until the first town, Marciac, which is known for its jazz festival “Jazz in Marciac” that takes place every year in august.

The arrival in the city was a bit eerie: it was so foggy that we couldn’t see very far away and we had no idea wether the town was big or not. And then, we arrived at what looked like the main square and it was market day! The town had a really nice vibe to it and so we stayed there for about an hour and a half, between the coffee break and the market. Loïc bought yet another book, as if he didn’t had enough already.

The rest of the day went by pretty quickly. We arrived at Auriébat in the beginning of the afternoon, and at some point we took a wrong path and lost ourselves… We had to backtrack, which made us lose between 20 and 30 minutes. It could have been worse.

One of many fields in the south

Around 16:30/17h we arrived at Maubourguet, our stop for the day. We were used to small, ghost towns, and now we had two cities full of life in a single day! It was almost overwhelming. We treated ourselves a good pint of beer to celebrate the end of the first week of walking. It seems so easy now, but back then it was quite the milestone.

I stopped by the tourism office to see if they had a map of the area, and walked away with a very good guidebook and a spot at the city camping, all offered by the nice lady of the office. Maubourguet, we owe you one.