Day 6 - Verres to Pont St Martin - Saturday June 20, 2015

Breakfast was at 7:30am, a much better time. Cereal and yogurt for breakfast, cakes and croissant, etc.  We are both feeling pretty good today, it’s not as hot and we got going at 8:08am.

We ripped the maps out of the book, but ignored the instructions and simply followed the GPS to start. It took us no time to get out of the city, and then we followed a lovely path alongside the river Dora Baltea and crossed under the highway. We managed to make 4.5km to Arnad in an hour! We walked past an old church and through the historic part of Arnad, then crossed through an underpass back to the other side of the highway on the way to Hone. At Hone we stopped at a bar for ice tea, chips, and a bathroom break, then on to 19^th century fort in Bard

, built by the one of the oldest royal families in the world, the Savoy’s. This stronghold has been fortified since before Roman times. This is almost certainly one of the positions occupied by the troops of Ostrogothe, King, Theodoric in the 6^th century. Bard and his descendants governed it from 1034 to 1242. It then passed to the Savoys. It gave Napolean some trouble in 1800 and was razed to the ground in reprisal. It was rebuilt in 1830 to 1838.

After that, we passed over a 1 century BC road, with cart tracks worn into the rock, and through a Roman arch to the village of Donnas.

To be sure we got our major climb of the day, we then trekked up 110 metres to Perloz, and back down to Pont St Marin.

We managed to cover 20.6 km today, with an ascent of 728 metres in 5 hours and 48 minutes elapsed time, and 4 hours and 17 minutes walking time, for a moving average of 4.8 km an hour.

We stayed at Hotel Cabun in Pont Saint Martin, which had a lovely balcony overlooking Perloz (that we had climbed to coming in to town). We spent a lot of time on the balcony (plus dried our laundry on it very quickly).  Dinner was included today and at dinner we met the French pilgrims we had met the day before on the trail.  This time they said they were going to Rome.

The dinner was excellent.  I had a salad, which wasn’t on the menu, Russell had pasta in tomatoe sauce, and then for the primo plate I had veal (hefer) and Russ had meatballs in tomatoe sauce. Dessert was tiramisu. Very good. The problem (although a minor complaint) with having our meals included is we don’t get much choice. Virtually everyone in the restaurant had this cheese fondue thing for an appetizer, which we got the impression was excellent. It would have been nice to have tried that.

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