Paris-Montrouge Scribbler

  Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, 2003 .  Week 2  (2-8 May) Friday, 2 May 2003 .  Espalion .  [Day 8] 7:50 p.m. Espalion in Aveyron, the home town of our Parisian neighbor, Michèle Delsol. We’re staying in a real hotel, the Hôtel de France, the local gîte being full. 10:00 p.m. This hotel room seems like a palace. I did yoga, took a shower, and washed two days of clothes. Caroline the same (minus yoga). At 8 p.m. we went out, found a bar with internet services and sent/read messages. Then on to the Brasserie “Le Palais” for dinner. I had brandade de morue (a puree of salt cod, potatoes, and garlic) and green salad, for €6.10. At another table a group of young Turkish men were playing cards. Workmen, I suppose. I was curious to ask them what they were doing in Espalion, but I didn’t feel like intruding. A beautiful walk for much of today, especially in the later morning with sun and blue skies. A big descent, though, and some ups a...

  Here follows the daily journal I kept during the trip, edited for clarity, with illustrations added (my photos + pictures taken from the internet), with mile and pound equivalents added to metric measurements, and with the benefit of hindsight. I should note that we had neither cell phones nor digital cameras -- technological developments just coming in, but which hadn't yet reached us.   Friday, 25 April 2003. Night spent in Le Puy-en-Velay .  [Day 1] 8:15 a.m . Caroline and I are en route from Paris to Le Puy-en-Velay via St. Etienne, in a train (TGV) that left Paris at 7:00 a.m. (from the internet: ontheworldmap.com)  Not many people are in this train. The weather is cloudy, with a bit of clearing as we head south, but not cold. Wednesday we both arrived in Paris, where we stayed with Claude and Suzanne, my wife Marie-Henriette’s maternal uncle and aunt (Caroline’s great-uncle and great-aunt). Almost 79 years old, they both seem fine, Claude now...

  The Road to Santiago de Compostela, 2003: A Pilgrim's Diary 2. Background to the pilgrimage Spring semester, 2002-2003, I took a leave of absence from my teaching duties in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Bilkent University, Ankara. The book I had been working on for many years was at last finished ( Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome ), so it was time for a break. I spent the first three months in Athens, reading in the great library of the American School of Classical Studies. I was investigating especially the history of archaeological exploration in the region of Kinet Höyük (ancient Issos), an ancient port city in southern Turkey, in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. The site had been under excavation since 1992, and I was a member of the project team. In late April, I left Athens and Ankara and flew to Paris to begin a completely different activity: hiking the famous lat...