Our first (literal hurdle) is the sluice gate that is pouring water into the rice fields. For a walker this is nothing – 2 concrete slabs separating a metre of air and below a quick running flow of water. A walker would do this in a bold stride. But we have to pursuade half a tonne of horse to jump this with a tiny take_off and landing platform. She looks, considers, ponders the alternatives and then leaps clearing the channel and putting a second jump to the field below to show how easy it was.
Babette is walking well, eats and drinks a little, but needs coffee. Our first village turns out to be closed – I thought this only happened in France. We walk on. Lamporo boasts a whole host of dots on the sketch maps from our guide book and so I hope it will provide some options – it turns out to be a crossroads (with traffic lights), a church and mercifully a bed. We will stay in the Parrocchia and let Babette rest. The football season is over and so I commandeer the football ground as a paddock for Nellie. The crossroads also boasts a Tratorria with the option of a pilgrim menu (not seen one of those since Spain). I will use the menu as a test of Babette's health before making the last 30km into Vercelli.
Accommodation Parrocchia Lamporo: rating – PR – the only game in town, but it has a good clean bed, a warm shower, sits on the route and is across the traffic lights from the Tratorria.
Paul
Babette has declared prayers and churches redundant because God is clearly a Blog-follower. The sun is shining and the rain has stopped.
We take a deep breath and pay up to the very friendly though well-heeled patron and set sail up a very busy Strada Statale for the old town of Gassino. There seems to be some unwritten rules about these little yellow pilgrim signs that we follow:
1.When you need them most they disappear.
2.Don't expect to find them in towns
3.and don't expect to find them on busy roads.
I think this last rule arises through some kind of conscience on the part of the sign stickers. How can they possibly ask pilgrims to walk down this busy road with no pavement and crash barriers closing off any possible escape from the traffic? And so they salve their conscience by not putting up any stickers at all. This compounds the sin as we wander back and forth trying to spot the right direction amid the Saturday traffic. Mercifully this was a short experience before arriving in the old town where we were surrounded by a throng of via Francigena enthusiasts and being presented as heroes to the priest at the church in old Gassino. Thereafter the route is on quiet roads and is gloriously signed (by the enthusiasts) even with regular maps to chart your progress.
In a very short period we experience the warmth and the isolation/insularity of these lovely Italians. The warmth – we are walking down a pretty busy stretch of road when a car swings across lanes and pulls up beside us. The driver (a young professional woman) leaps out and pleads to be allowed to touch our horse – I cannot think of another country where this is just the way the people are..The isolation – every and I really mean every house in the region has 2 must haves: an electrically operated port-cullis (horizontal) and a collection of chained and rabid guard dogs. From behind one of these barriers a voice asserted that our horse was not allowed to eat the grass spilling from the verge of the road.
We are extolling the virtues of the local community taking responsibility for route finding and signing when we suddenly cross the border into the parish of Torrazza Piemonte where the signing is virtually invisible and the route is on muddy and overgrown tracks beside the flooded rice fields. We guess that the town of Torrazza Piemonte will not offer a great welcome to our crew of scruffy 2 and 4 legged pilgrims and so opt for a night under the stars in a glade between rice fields with night birdsong to send us to sleep - which birds sing all night long with a never ending variety of songs? Nellie is less entranced by the setting as she has to put up with the attentions of millions different kinds of fly and deal with one of her remaining phobia – rattling and hooting trains..
Around midnight Babette wakes and decides to check on Nellie. I see her disappear from the tent with torch in hand and wait her return. After a couple of minutes I wonder what is wrong and peer into the darkness – no sign of the torch, perhaps she is settling Nellie as she is not too keen on the bright torch light – 2 more minutes and I start calling – no answer – does this mean be quiet and don't disurb Nellie? - 2 more minutes and I am on my feet trying to find Babette. She is just regaining consciousness after fainting on the way back to the tent. We get back to the tent and I try my best to minister to her and work out what happened. Babette thinks that our bizarre evening meal (salami, cheese, curiously dry bread, custard filled rolls, chocolate biscuits, more chocolate and red wine) got her. I think it is a recurrence of the low blood pressure that she suffers from. For the next couple of hours I poke and prod her to make sure she has not fainted again before falling asleep myself. In the morning she professes to be fine although with a sensitive stomach. I worry, what the heck do I do with a horse a dog a potentially sick wife and 60 kilos of stuff in the middle of a rice field 50km from the nearest hospital.. so I turn to the only available remedy – hope.
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