Stage 50: Vevey to Aigle – 25 km

In Vevey you will find the Alimentarium museum dedicated to food and nutrition. In front of the museum is the Fork, a sculpture by Swiss artist Jean-Paul Zaugg. Paula fell in love. We leave Lac Leman to walk up the Rhone valley in the shadow of the towering Swiss Alps.  We are filled with anticipation of our upcoming climb up and over the Gran San Bernardo Pass.  Our legs are strong, walking for the past 8 weeks is good training for the climb and we are able to scale 2000 and 3000 feet with reasonable effort, nonetheless walking up 8000 feet seems daunting. All will be revealed soon enough.  We do hope altitude will reduce the heat. Walking in 92 degrees under a pounding hot sun is exhausting.

The Tourist Office, there is one in every town, where we sometimes have our “Pilgirm’s Passport” stamped, asks us to fill out an information sheet which we are glad to do and we get to see who else is walking. There are surprisingly few walkers.  In Aigle we saw an entry by Hellen, the English lady we first met in Guines, who apparently passed through a couple of days ago.  There is a Canadian duo a week ahead of us. No sign of the father/daughter.  Half a dozen entries before June.  One of the questions on the sheet is to check the purpose of the journey with options like Religious, Health, Adventure, Tourism and Other.  We check Other because we haven’t settled on the purpose of our walk in terms of what we want to get out of it other than a good walk.

One of the benefits of walking every day is that it clears your mind.  Our inboxes are still inundated with hourly and daily alerts about the latest political and economic emergencies but our walk helps us set them aside.  The only insight, if it can be called that, is that the world fundamentally changed since January 6, domestically, and February 24, internationally.  We perceive current affairs through the prism of those 2 events.   Not a great comfort but it is what it is. Keep walking.