Le Puy route guidebook hot from Paris

[Frank Metcalf and Mary Doherty]

Hello all,

A friend just brought us from Paris the 2004 "Le Chemin du Puy vers
Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle du Velay aux Pyrenees" guidebook. It's
great!!!  Reasonable size and weight, beautiful layout and photos, clear
waymaps, poetic but simple route descriptions and directions, concise
listings for services en route, and useful historical and linguistic
information (such as why "Montcuq" is not "an incongruity"(!!) when spoken
in the langues d'oc). It's layed out in 29 stages (plus several variants),
but it acknowledges that pilgrims make their own stages as needed and
eventually ignore the suggested ones.

I'm going to read it through, together with Raju's Cicerone guide, to see
whether the latter adds anything significantly useful worth lugging across
France. I've already decided to take along the French guide and, as always,
the ultralight CSJ one which is unbeatably concise. In view of the French
guide's lodging and dining information, the other choice I have to make is
what to do with the Miam-miam-dodo guide to the Le Puy route's
infrastructure. I enjoy the book's cheeky style and wealth of detail, but
do I need to lug it along?  I don't know. There's a tyranny of choice.

On the Camino frances, the CSJ guide and some photocopied pages were all we
took and all we needed. No maps other than a few xeroxed town maps, except
for a map of Spain to give the larger picture, and so that new friends
could show us where they lived. But the six IGN route maps of the GR 65 are
completely seductive, as are the two French books mentioned above.

The writing in those books is more strenuous (less bland) than I had
expected. There's a true attention to an interesting style, which is
certainly engaging, but which also presents the odd challenge for one whose
French is decidedly a second language.

Frank