On Our Way... Walking the Way of St. Francis: Walk from Village of Camaldoli to Badia Prataglia

So much beauty today! As you can see I am treating my feet to a soak in the bidet as we have just made our way down into a very quaint little town, Badia Prataglia. Today's walk took us through a national forest, starting at an incredible eleventh century monastery. Our day started with a couple hours of up. We didn't leave from Consuma, we drove down the mountain we were on and into the city of Stia and then into Camaldoli. We walked through the city and visited the Santa Maria church in the city center. This was an old church but I'm sure not as old as the monastery. We then continued driving down the mountain to start our walk with another up hill climb, due to time constraints we are skipping over a couple of the more difficult days. We learned last night that Sandy Brown had stayed where we were last night just 10 days ago. Turns out yesterday's walk was mismarked moderate instead of difficult along with a couple other errors he had. His new book is supposed to have it right. Sonjas plan to skip a couple of the longer days was well received by me and my feet. Today's hike, all through gorgeous old forest, was only 5 miles instead of the 10 if we had not driven ahead. Surprising to us, we are only going about a mile an hour so it still took 5 hours. We did take our time stopping often to admire one tree or another.

All we have to have is a total of 100 kilometers to receive our official stamp in Assisi and as of today, after only three days we have 44 kilometers completed.

My thoughts were with my brother Jim and his wife Tracy today, reminding me of many of our walks through the woods. They will definitely have to do this trail or one like it. Again we had a light rain but the sun would come out and spotlight certain areas, like the ferns just starting to turn from a green to a gorgeous orange. At times we could see surrounding mountains through the trees especially as we reached a peak. We found and enjoyed wild blackberries along the trails edge.

We did not see a single person on the trail today, yesterday's walk we saw one couple as we were allowing town. We did have dinner with two couples from Holland who also started walking from Florence. Last night's owner of the accommodations and the pizzeria, Irina, was incredible. She offered to dry our wet things from yesterday and had them ready this morning at breakfast. She does a wonderful job taking care of the pilgrims who pass her way. We paid only 50 Euros for a bed, dinner, breakfast, bottle of wine and she even led us to Stia this morning as she was delivering someone's luggage to their next stop.

The people here truly inspirational, the old woman pointing us in the right direction, the old man with the grapes, Irina and Irina's father among others, even though we couldn't communicate and learn from their knowledge, we are discovering that we can still pick up and learn from a piece of their free and easy spirit.

Pictured below are shots from Stia and Camaldoli:

Interesting artwork bench

Cool Fountain in Town Center

This was the monastery where we started in the National Park.

We start right away headed up a rocky path into a gorgeous forest. Each morning I make a decision about whether I should carry my poles or my camera. I was happy today that I chose my camera.

About an hour or so in we came across a great place for hikers to stay the night complete with a rock fire pit.

You can see the Tau, the sign of St. Francis Way on the left of the arrow. We followed lots of red and white stripes as well as the official yellow and blue that marked the official route. This sign says 2 hours and 40 minutes, at this time we had to double that time to account for the uphill climbs. We didn't know it at this point, and we got much better as we went but this day was a long one taking us several hours to reach the cute town of Badia Prataglia.

We came across a multicolored fern field.

We stopped in the clouds at this lunch spot atop the ridge. As we sat there the sun came out to highlight the colors and allow the the tiny water droplets to shine like stars around us. We discovered a deer path close by that took us into a high meadow that allowed us to look across the hills.

It was interesting to see this bundling so often throughout our days. They run very tidy forests in Italy.

It was always a treat if we could first see the town we would walk into. We got this view as we started down and around the hill we had just climbed. We stood there for many minutes watching the sun travel over and around the town. You can still see the clouds hanging over the distant hillside but the sun was out for us the remainder of the day.