GR70 - Chemin de Stevenson
Day 7 (20.4 km), Day 8 (23.8 km), Day 9 (29.5 km), Day 10 (20.7 km), Day 11 (30.1 km), Day 12 (18.5 km).
So, Robert Louis Stevenson.
Stevenson, still a young man, undertook his travels in the Cevennes to distance himself from a love affair with an American woman of which his friends and family did not approve and who had returned to her husband in California. No wonder the French loved the story!
While Stevenson was a celebrity in his time and admired by his contemporaries, he was discredited after WWI as being ‘too Victorian’ by EM Forster and Virginia Woolf, and excluded from 20th century cannon. Seems a bit snobby to me. Cheap shots are easy, here’s one now - thank goodness in a post-Demidenko world we can comment on the flaws of feminist writers like Woolf, too!
Travels in the Cevennes is a classic of travel and outdoor literature. Jeckle and Hyde sits easily in the company of gothic novels Dracula, Frankenstein and others. In fact it’s probably better.
Anyway, the trail gets notably higher, hotter, drier and more rugged south of the ridge line where it crosses the summit of Mount Lozere. High summer in an agricultural region that hasn’t changed much.
Last words go to Stevenson:
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints ...To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future?"
Self-guided Tour Organised Through: Macs Adventures: Great accommodations and track notes.
