Some days are just horrible and this is one of them. Desperate to get to Italy, we seem to do nothing but go round in circles the wrong way and meet ourselves coming back. It's frustrating, time-consuming, tiring and plain annoying, but having finally reached Briançon, we assume that the worst is over. Wrong. On previous journeys we discovered what we called the 'one-eye towns', where people seem to be more closely related than is entirely healthy, and other towns where the 'bastard' gene predominates. Briançon is the latter. Having found the route up to the citadel without a flight of stairs (Paul is tracing the one with the stairs), I then find that it is blocked by a van whose owner absolutely refuses to move it the 5 metres that would give Nellie and I enough space to pass. He is doing some electrical work and does not see why he should stop for a weird woman and her horse. I try to discover an alternative, but this one is also blocked by a group of people moving house – it would be too much to ask them to move, so I go back and ask the van-man (it's white), though less politely than before. It makes no difference and then his neighbour comes out to give me some verbal too. By this time I am raging, but Paul has come back and with no alternative so we launch ourselves into the main traffic and somehow weave our way up to the top of the town, where I generally indulge in an episode of pilgrim-rage - every bit as dangerous as its equivalent road-rage, except that it involves hell and damnation too. Then the story only gets worse, the previously blue sky is getting more grey by the second and we are later than we should be, so we stop in le Fontenil where there is a gite d'etape … of sorts. I'll say no more than we did not want to stay there and he did not want our dog – an easy get-out for everyone concerned. Sometimes sleeping out in the wilderness is preferable, so we did, in the woods just beyond Le Fontenil and just before the heavens opened, at which point it is probably appropriate to add that though one of the disadvantages of travelling in early spring is the bad/wet/cold weather, one of the distinctive advantages is that you have the opportunity to watch the countryside burst into life. Blossom pricking out and then pouring colour over bare branches, hillsides changing shape and tone by the hour – the variety of greens infinite as the trees come into leaf and the ground is patchworked with small flowers. As for wildlife, Nellie has brought our attention to a pack of fox clubs playing in the woods, a marmot running across the road and then stopping within less than a metre of us (I thought it was a shaggy cat until it whistled) and numerous deer.
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