The Office de Tourisme at St. Jean d'Angely made arrangements for me to stay at St. Hilaire with the Vinet family's B&B at about the same distance as Juicq in my plan. It's half the distance to Saintes and still fighting an ankle problem (although it's getting better), I thought it best to cut my distance back a bit. At 19 km (12 mi) and low 80s with some cloud cover, it was a perfect day for walking!
I had to take a few km detour from my Camino bike path to visit the Lantern of the Dead at a village named Fenioux. Built on a site known to have been used for rituals by Celts at around 500 AD, it's an 11-columned (!!) memorial for the dead--a fascinating structure that one can climb with a very narrow 38-step spiral staircase inside. The local Notre Dame church is within a few hundred meters.
A few other sites caught my eye along the gently rolling hills: an old water wheel on the Boutonne River, a farmer (or Coop) tapping into this little stream for irrigation water (did they have a permit??), and fields of vineyards (both old and new) appearing in greater numbers. By the way, the grain fields have all, as far as I can see, now been harvested and appear to be in the fields in a rolled configuration or in rectangular solids sometimes stacked seven or eight bales high. This massive staging area was overwhelming--one wonders how they managed to stack it so high.
