newfydog
Veteran Member
- Time of past OR future Camino
- Pamplona-Santiago, Le Puy- Santiago, Prague- LePuy, Menton- Toulouse, Menton- Rome, Canterbury- Lausanne, Chemin Stevenson, Voie de Vezelay
Before pirate tales made Robert Louis Stevenson famous, the sickly Scottish writer was having a bad 1878. His girlfriend Fanny, an older American visiting Europe with a grown daughter, left him to return to her husband. His writing career had fizzled out. His parents were hounding him to return to an abandoned law career in Edinburgh. Instead, Stevenson bought a donkey went on a 240 km hike.
He wrote a bit of a travel classic about the journey, “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes”, a book in which he is credited by some as the first hiker, i.e. the first person to claim the walk is more important than the destination. He also invented the sleeping bag for the trip. Much of the charm of his account comes from his love/hate relationship with Modestine, a donkey who carried his gear.
His route, 240 km across a rather wild area of central France, has been marked out as Grande Randonnee 70, Le Chemin Stevenson. It is a popular trip, with the option of renting a donkey to accompany you. As much as we like donkeys, we’ll carry are own gear. A donkey requires two people, one to push and one to pull. Plus, we won’t be carrying a leg of cold mutton. The route traverses the areas of the Velay, the Gevaudan and the Cevennes, a mountainous region with the headwaters of the Loire, Lot and Tarn. The tiny villages along the route have not changed much since Stevenson’s trip.
So, does the Chemin Stevenson belong on this board? I would say yes, for various reasons. The route starts in LePuy en Velay, the town where the whole pilgrimage of St James began in the year 951. It overlaps with the ancient Chemin de St Giles, a medieval route to the amazing cathedral in st. giles and an important connection to the route from Arles to Santiago. Stevenson himself was very interested in the Protestant-Catholic issues of the day, and spent time with Trappist monks on the way. Also, Ivar asked me to load my route GPS file to the resource section, so I guess the way of RLS has the endorsement of this site’s founder.
After finishing his hike, Stevenson followed his love Fanny to California, convinced her to seek a divorce and marry him, then went off and wrote Treasure island and Jekyll and Hyde. It seems the trip did him some good.
This route will be a major departure from our normal mode of travel. We have done our other trips on mountain bike, and never had reservations or a fixed itinerary. We looked at portion of the trail and decided it was too rough and rocky to bike with gear. We then found out that May is the high season, in part because of the fields of flowers. We’ll be walking this one, and have booked a chambre d’hote or small hotel for each night.
We’ll be leaving LePuy May 26. Maybe we’ll go to the morning mass at the Cathedral to say Bon Chemin! to the pelerins, headed to Santiago.
He wrote a bit of a travel classic about the journey, “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes”, a book in which he is credited by some as the first hiker, i.e. the first person to claim the walk is more important than the destination. He also invented the sleeping bag for the trip. Much of the charm of his account comes from his love/hate relationship with Modestine, a donkey who carried his gear.
His route, 240 km across a rather wild area of central France, has been marked out as Grande Randonnee 70, Le Chemin Stevenson. It is a popular trip, with the option of renting a donkey to accompany you. As much as we like donkeys, we’ll carry are own gear. A donkey requires two people, one to push and one to pull. Plus, we won’t be carrying a leg of cold mutton. The route traverses the areas of the Velay, the Gevaudan and the Cevennes, a mountainous region with the headwaters of the Loire, Lot and Tarn. The tiny villages along the route have not changed much since Stevenson’s trip.
So, does the Chemin Stevenson belong on this board? I would say yes, for various reasons. The route starts in LePuy en Velay, the town where the whole pilgrimage of St James began in the year 951. It overlaps with the ancient Chemin de St Giles, a medieval route to the amazing cathedral in st. giles and an important connection to the route from Arles to Santiago. Stevenson himself was very interested in the Protestant-Catholic issues of the day, and spent time with Trappist monks on the way. Also, Ivar asked me to load my route GPS file to the resource section, so I guess the way of RLS has the endorsement of this site’s founder.
After finishing his hike, Stevenson followed his love Fanny to California, convinced her to seek a divorce and marry him, then went off and wrote Treasure island and Jekyll and Hyde. It seems the trip did him some good.
This route will be a major departure from our normal mode of travel. We have done our other trips on mountain bike, and never had reservations or a fixed itinerary. We looked at portion of the trail and decided it was too rough and rocky to bike with gear. We then found out that May is the high season, in part because of the fields of flowers. We’ll be walking this one, and have booked a chambre d’hote or small hotel for each night.
We’ll be leaving LePuy May 26. Maybe we’ll go to the morning mass at the Cathedral to say Bon Chemin! to the pelerins, headed to Santiago.
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that cover this route?
