Peronel said:
Can anyone give me any information on the practicalities of camping between Le Puy and SJPP?
It's totally doable. I did it last year from Le Puy to St. Jean and onward to Santiago. Others have mentioned campgrounds, which you can use if you really want to, I suppose, but the ones I saw were awfully crowded and not my idea of a good time. It's pretty easy to find places to stealth camp well outside of towns, though, which--as a whole--was a wonderful experience for me. So don't feel constrained to staying in just established campgrounds.
I posted more extensively about my thoughts of camping on the thread at
http://www.caminodesantiago.me/board/el-camino-frances/topic17037.html
In a nutshell, though, here's the meat of my thoughts:
* If you set up camp *before* a town, you generally don't have to worry about a lot of pilgrims walking past you and waking you up in the morning. If you set up camp within a few miles out of a town, they will wake you up if you're camped immediately alongside the trail. (If you walk five or ten minutes off trail, though, you can solve that problem.)
* Set up camp late in the afternoon--perhaps an hour before sunset.
* If there are "scenic alternate" paths rather than the main paths most pilgrims follow, you'll get a lot more solitude and find much better places to stealth camp.
* It would be wise to practice "leave no trace." Even after you leave camp, you don't want anyone to be able to recognize the site as a camp after you're gone. None of the locals who caught me camping seemed to have a problem with it, but their attitudes might have been a lot different if camping pilgrims had left behind messes in the past.
I kept a daily blog of my Camino adventures which starts at
http://www.anotherlongwalk.com/2012/08/ ... egins.html (and ends with a photo of my first campsite a short ways out of Le Puy). =)
So... totally doable. During September and October, you might not even need a tent most of the time if you want to save some weight. I hiked during August and the first several days of September and just cowboy camped most nights. The couple of times it did rain overnight, I headed indoors for the night. (I love camping--I'm not so fond of camping in the rain.)
Buen camino! =)
-- Ryan