THE GOOD - THE BAD - & THE UGLY - walking in the Languedoc

I endeavor to go on a decent walk every other day i.e. at least 2 hours, up to 4 hours.
Some were pretty good and enjoyable and have been noted to do again, some are awful for varying reasons, and ugly? well that I'll explain later....

GOOD.
The remaining section of the Voie Verte (as in greenway/railway line converted to walking and cycling path) has been completed starting at Mons-la-Trivalle, ending at Bedarieux. Mons is a pleasant village in a glorious setting, Bedarieux is an absolute dump (modern art centre excepted) - in my opinion. Anyway I walked for just over an hour from Mons on the Voie Verte and then made the return trip through the villages, up and down the lower slopes of the Caroux; through  L'Aire Vielle, Les Claps, Colombieres and Haut Colombieres (very nice spot), St.Martin and then a lovely old path from there through vineyards and La Coste back to Mons. Meandering along like this made the return trip twice as long and I enjoyed every minute of it.

 

House in Les Vielles

BAD.

I studied the map, I listed the hamlets, I measured the distances, first point of reference -  Vacarials, 3 km. from departure point, O.K. lets go. Parked car and promptly set off walking along the wrong forestry 'road', half an hour later as I was walking uphill and knowing I shouldn't be I consulted the map and found there was a track that joined the high road to the low road, I back tracked to find it. So that had added 20 minutes extra to the walk, by the time I had fought my way to the end of this 'joining up' path (should have brought my machete with me) I was another 20mins behind schedule.Then just to be really stupid I set of on this road in the wrong direction  for 5 minutes. Right ho, back into the trees, but this time on the way marked path, no more lethal brambles, I was even quite happy for a while. Then - 'It's been a while since I saw a marker' methinks several times - and several times I retraced my steps to make sure I hadn't missed a turn, so I basically did the route 3 times over, forward, back, forward again. In my head I was composing my rant in french to be delivered to the tourist office about their s**** signposts that'll be merde balissage?? I never found Vacarials, I would say I was within 100 metres of it, but what had been a pretty clear path for the last bit just totally disappeared into a uniformly dense wood. I gave up, had lunch, went back to the car by walking a minor and then a not very pleasant main road.  3 hours walking and in a way you could say I hadn't even done 3km! I will not be defeated, next year I will be back!!

View from the wrong road, before I realized it was the wrong road, ah! I remember I was so happy then.

UGLY.

I walked from St.Pons to Corniou and took a different turn off the forestry trail down a little path to Soulange, not so much a hamlet as a restaurant and a chambres d'hote, very unusually set within a forest of bamboo, it's quite magical. I was happily tootling along the narrow well paved road when - what's that in the middle of the road? I slowed and approached cautiously. Well there's something you don't see every day, a crayfish in the middle of the road. Now I haven't met a raw crayfish before (Le Somail in St.Pons serve a delicious little casserole of them in a creamy sauce) and it didn't like the look of me and reared up and flexed it's claws in a menacing fashion. You may laugh but not knowing much about crayfish, apart from they're delicious, I didn't know what speed they can travel at, so if it decides to go for a nasty nip to my ankles is the road wide enough for me to get round it?? Well it was and I did, unscathed, and mercifully there was no traffic on the road so I guess it survived too.

 O.K so it looks idiotic now but I really did wonder if I could get around it, look it is ready to pounce.