I knew today would be getting out late today since I had a doctor's appointment at 9:30am. I figured an hour there and an hour to get back to the hotel, pack, and leave. That would get me on the bike a bit before noon.
I left the hotel at 9am, giving myself plenty of time to get to the doctor's office and figure out what to do from there. From what I could tell, all the doctors in the building had a single waiting room. I took a seat but didn't bother looking through the French magazines. Instead, I tried to decipher the basic medical posters hung on the walls.
It was hard to know when my turn would come as there were others in the waiting room and I didn't know what my doctor looked like. About every 10 minutes, another person would poke his/her head into the room and announce a name. Time went by. By 10am, it became clear that leaving before noon was a pipe dream.
One interesting social fact that I noticed while sitting in the waiting room is how ingrained it is in the French to respond when someone says "Bonjour!" I was sitting in the, by now full, room and it looked to me like no one knew anyone. Then, a man walks in, says Bonjour, and every one in the room responded. These people didn't know each other and were waiting to see a doctor. In the US, this wouldn't happen. I was surprised to see it happen in France.
About an hour after my appointment, Dr. Foucard called my name and ushered me into his office/exam room. He was much more thorough than my previous doctor and did a full exam: blood pressure, lung listen, temperature. I told him my story and he felt my ribs (still very tender), looked at the hematoma, and then the stitches. He announced that my stitches couldn't come out yet because they were on my elbow, which takes longer to heal. He said wait another 10 days on those. Great, I thought, another trip to the doctor.
After hearing my story and feeling around a bit, he said that I had two or three broken ribs and would have to get an echo radiograph to insure that I wasn't bleeding internally. He went to his desk, called the nearby hospital, made the arrangements, took my 22 Euros, and sent me on my way.
The hospital was just around the corner. I found the X-ray department and waited my turn. One of the nurses spoke some English and when I explained that I was an American, she took me to the registration section. They kept asking me for my "green card," which I assumed is the standard health card given to all Frence or EU members. It seemed to confuse them that I didn't have such a card. After about 15 minutes of taking data out of my passport and lots of French I couldn't understand, the nurse led me back to the X-ray department. I sat for about 10 minutes before being asked into the X-ray room.
The doctor who arrived spoke excellent English, which helped a lot. He gooped up my left side and after watching some images that looked like static on a TV, he said that my internal organs were fine. I waited 10 minutes for his report and went back to the registration office. A minor comedy insued as they tried to figure out how much to charge me. It took them 10 minutes to determine a figure (55 Euros) and another 10 to realized that none of the three credit cards that I had would work on their reader. Luckily, I had enough cash, paid them, walked back to the doctor's office, dropped off the report and left. There was no way I was going to wait another hour to talk with him again.
By this time, it was getting close to noon and it was raining. I walked back to the hotel, stopping to get bread and some other food. It took a while to change clothes, pack up, get my bike, and leave.
Figeac is in the bottom of a bowl where every direction is up. I easily found the road I wanted out of town and it was up from the get go. There is nothing quite like riding a loaded touring bike, uphill, in the rain, on a deserted road. I saw a few lightening flashes but the distant thunder told me it wasn't close. It worried me a bit but I kept pedalling.
Five main roads go into Figeac and I crossed the last one when I was finally out of the city. It was still all up and the rain intensified. I first took refuge under some trees. The rain slackened and I was off only to have to take refuge in a bus shelter a few hundred meters away. It was at this point that I realized it would rain all day.
When the rain lessened, I was off again. It was then that I first noticed all the backpackers. There were about 20 walking single file toward Figeac. I wondered what kind of club this was that backpacked in the rain. The further I rode, the more I saw. Some were in groups; some solo. It was only later that I would learn that these were people making a pilgramage.
The terrain was the usual farm fields and tree lined roads. It was all up. Sometimes the rain would seem to stop but the dripping of the trees made up for it. I stopped to eat a sandwich at Montredon, a nothing of a town where I stood under the overhang of the tiny civic building to assemble and eat lunch. I watched several large trucks drop off live cattle to the place just across the street while a nearby dog barked his head off.
About a mile past Montredon, I crested the top of Figeac's valley and was coasting down when a bolt of lightening flashed right above my head. I knew it was close because the thunder was instantaneous and the lightening flashed blueish. I was riding on a road through 30-40 foot trees. It scared me to be in the middle of nowhere in a rain and lightening storm. I stopped to collect my thoughts and realized that I would need to find permanent shelter, soon.
After a few minutes of getting dripped on but seeing no more lightening, I continued cautiously down the road. As I approached my turnoff to the Lot Valley, the skies opened up again and I took refuge in a poorly angled bus shelter where I couldn't actually stay out of the wet.
I checked my maps and saw that I was close to a town and decided it was time to call it a day. I spent a good 10 minutes under this shelter getting wetter and wetter until the rain slowed and I made a dash for it. I coasted down a road lined with houses and then hit a main road and more rain. I found a better bus shelter this time, had a snack, and considered my plight.
Note how many drops you see on the road in the time it took the camera to take this picture!
I left this shelter and coasted down all the way to the Lot River which runs along the edge of Livenhac-le-Haut, the town I was in. There were restaurants but no hotels. I backtracked a bit and saw a pharmacy. I went in and waited, dripping water on their floor. Eventually it was my turn and the clerk directed me to a place across a street and up an alley. I saw a sign for a hostel and went in.
This wasn't anything like a hotel. It was a large house with a big yard and some kind of renovated old turret. The turret had been converted into a two-floor dormitory with two beds on each floor (there were more rooms in the house). I rented one of the beds. The woman who ran the place spoke lots of languages, including English, and we had a nice conversation. It was here that I found out about the pilgramage route that I was biking on. She allowed me to put my bike in her garage and I took my panniers up into the tower and chose a bed.
The house included a cooking and dining area where breakfast was included at 5 Euros. There were about 15 people there, but only one of them, an older Swiss man, spoke English. He told me that was on a walking pilgramage to Santiago de Compostela, had started in Switzerland, and had been at it for a couple of weeks now. He showed me the route book he was following which had detailed maps of daily hikes and lists of places to eat, sleep, and shop along the way.
By this time, the rain had stopped and we walked into the small older town that had a church (which he visited) and a small store on the main square. The fresh vegetable selection at the store was meager so I opted for some pasta, sauce and canned vegetables. I returned back to the hostel, made dinner, and checked my maps over once again. I had only covered a few miles on this day and the chance that I would get all the way to Avignon in just a few days seemed to get more remote. I went to sleep shortly thereafter.
I heard others arrive and make their ways into the various dormitory beds. But, it wasn't until the middle of the night that I discovered the universal law of dormitories: Either you are the one snoring or the one being kept awake. Since I don't snore, I found it hard to get much sleep.