Day four of a long walking trip rarely produces a plan. It produces a mood. Marley Kreiser's account on The Trek — a travel journal ahead of a Camino de Santiago pilgrimage — captures exactly that, and it doubles as a surprisingly useful sketch of how to spend a low-key day in Paris when the weather refuses to cooperate.
The day started with rain and an aching back, so the writer invented entertainment: navigating the narrow Paris sidewalks with an umbrella became a live game of Tetris, dodging and tilting past oncoming pedestrians. It's a small thing, but it sets the tone — the piece is less about ticking off monuments and more about paying attention to whatever the city offers.
The centrepiece was lunch at Chez Alain Miam Miam, an Instagram-famous sandwich shop where a queue of umbrellas forms outside and the man at the door greets customers with cheerful guesses about where they're from. The verdict on the sandwich itself was emphatic: crusty-yet-soft French bread loaded with melted cheese, jam, caramelised onions, tomato, lettuce and avocado. A passing stranger even offered an unsolicited "bon appétit" as the writer strolled down the street eating it. If you want a memorable cheap lunch in Paris, this is the kind of place worth queueing in the rain for.
From there the day slowed right down at the Jardin des Plantes, the city's main botanical garden on the Left Bank. This was the first moment of real stillness since arriving in France — sitting on a damp bench, watching a pigeon with an iridescent neck circle close enough to interrupt the writer's thoughts, followed by a pair of large green birds unlike anything they'd recognised. Then came the practical half of the day: a Starbucks session researching the first days of the Camino route, from hostel logistics to weather to the Basque history of the early towns on the Spanish side of the border. A pleasing thread emerged there — the writer had met a Basque man on a Colorado mountain in 2024, a chance conversation that now reads like the first breadcrumb toward walking through the Basque homeland itself.
The day closed simply: chocolate and cookies-and-cream gelato in a cone, then curling up on a friend's floor while rain and French conversation drifted by.
Why does this matter to a traveller? Because it's a good model for the in-between days we all have — the jet-lagged, pre-adventure days in a big city before the real trip begins. You don't need a list of sights. You need one great sandwich, one garden bench, and enough empty hours to let curiosity lead. It's also a gentle preview of the Camino mindset: slowing down, noticing birds, letting the days be unstructured. The solitude, the writer notes, is part of the point — total freedom to follow whatever catches your eye, without negotiating with anyone.
For anyone planning their own pilgrimage or just a slower kind of Paris day, this is a nice reminder that the best travel stories often come from the rainiest afternoons.
