Are you going to Rome? Pray for us!

Yesterday was a strange day of rather uninteresting walking along a highway and through pretty average scenery. We did reach the 100 kms to go point early in the morning.

We finally turned onto a country road and promptly fell in with an older man out walking. He spoke English, having lived in Nigeria for a while and was interested in horses. He had a local property he was hoping to develop as a base for the Via Francegina into Rome by horseback. He seemed to know about the trail and told us if we stayed with him and ignored the signs to our track, all would be well, he would set us on the right path. 1/2 an hour later he was ready to turn back and pointed us to a road. Even though he lived locally, our GPS revealed we were now several Kms off track and needed to work our way back across country. We had to ask directions from farmers obviously unused to seeing pilgrims. One couple harvesting their olives, when we asked for directions, said, "Are you going to Rome? Pray for us!"

Just as we were about to regain the VF, we discovered the keys from our room last night in one of our pockets. So we had to ring the place we stayed and apologize. We decided to continue to the town we were heading to and sort things out there.

We arrived in Vetralla which had the feel of a rather unfriendly suspicious town. Most pilgrims stay in other places. We were now too late for lunch and ended up making do with chips, coffee and chocolate. Our accommodation is the strangest we have had, an old room in the parish centre was set up by one of the parish workers. The linen changed on three beds and we were shown the bathroom (neither clean or tidy).

We were however given a good meal in the dining room, eating with a young man we thought might have been living in the parish complex. Then it was off to bed. Thankfully the room was warm. However there was not much sleep as the local Ambulance service used the upstairs area above our room and spend much of the night rearranging their furniture. The 3am to 4am shift were especially keen on dragging large items around on the floor above us for over an hour.

Our souvenired keys were collected the next morning and we set off for Sutri, buying some fruit from the market on the way. Merran in particular keen to leave Vetralla well behind.