More class issues

by Mike

Today’s Route

Waiting for Azure in the airport I saw three guys my age in suits go up the stairs and into a bar to pass the time. While I certainly don’t consider myself poor, I know that I’ll never be a part of their world – the world where you drop 6 Euros for a scotch because that’s what you do with your friends. At the time I was sitting at a table outside a cafe writing in my journal, hoping they wouldn’t kick me out because I couldn’t bring myself to pay 3 Euros for a muffin.

Earlier in the day I was parking the scooter and a homeless woman asked relentlessly for money. She said if I gave her money then nothing would happen to my scooter. I thought, “Is this woman threatening me?” then “If she is, could she even pull it off?” I doubted it and didn’t give her any money.

To be wandering dirty through France with a mohawk put me in my place pretty quick among the almost-homeless, as a guy that people in bakeries watch out of the corners of their eyes. I identify much more with the gardeners and the janitors than I do with the guys in suits even though I feel I’m being deceptive doing it. I mean, I grew up in Bellevue and have a degree in polisci… I feel like I was born in a suit world and am kinda posing as a laborer. But it feels strange to know that even if I know this, nobody else in France does (and I wonder to what extent the people in my life do). My identity in France is only the clothes I’m wearing and how I style my hair, really. If I went and bought a suit and shaved the hawk, I could walk with those guys. But I find I like laborers more, they have less to lose and less to prove. If you can even split the world into laborers and businesspeople. Maybe you can.

We live very well. And even though I consider 6 Euros way too much to pay for a drink we live luxuriously in other parts of our lives – we have a lot of time. We’re cheap, but we have a lot of time. After being in Colombia, it would be grotesque to actually consider myself poor, but here on the French Riviera I feel poor, I feel other people consider me poor. If being tossed around the social classes doesn’t make travel valuable, I don’t know what does.

We went to Juan-les-Pins today and despite still being on the modern coast, we saw the ancient human pastime of old people gossiping. In this case they were playing Boules, as they do all over Europe. You toss a little ball, then each player has two chances to get his or her bigger ball closest.

No huge insights today – we started the day by running some errands (we got panniers for the sides of the scooter, we found the best price for a ferry to Corsica, and we got in contact with a farm where we can wwoof) then made our way to Juan-les-Pins for the afternoon. J-les-P, as the kids might call it, is a well-off area of the coast where we walked and window shopped and even took in the sun for a few minutes. There were people on the beach with their shirts off and even a few swimming.

Amendment – I wish I’d saved this blog for the next day or at least rewritten it a couple times to clarify what I meant.
I don’t feel poor. What I feel is that I’m looked at as if I’m poor, and even that could be as much in my head as it is on the street. In Colombia, as we wrote, people literally crossed the street to beg from us, restaurant hosts would go out of their way to invite us in, specifically us, because we’re white.

The experience in France is on the other side of the spectrum, where restaurant hosts might hope we don’t come in because we don’t throw our money around, we split courses (including mains), we get the cheapest thing on the menu and we don’t get expensive bottles of wine if we get wine at all. Azure and I are travelers, and while we’re not poor, we’re certainly cheap. Next to the middle-upper class travelers and businesspeople who order whatever they want, we appear poor. But wealth is relative.

Traveling alone, the mohawk temporarily makes me an Other. My anxieties about my relative fiscal status are influenced by seeing how people have responded to my appearance with apprehension. I don’t feel “poor,” I feel “other,” though here in the South it hasn’t been nearly the oddity it was from Paris to Albi. I still, after all these years, am working to disconnect my ideas of social acceptability from ideas of fiscal success. I understand that being fiscally unsuccessful is acceptable, but in this post I revealed that I unconsciously link being an “Other” with fiscal failure.

Making maps

Today’s Route

by Mike

Azure came with an itinerary – we were going to visit this town called Gourdon that she’d randomly picked on the map and then she discovered that the pictures showed a beautiful hill town high above Nice. It was in Seattle that she did all this. After a flight to London (thanks Ellen!) and then another flight to Nice we got on the scooter and made that abstract itinerary turn into real smells and wind on the face.

The town was gorgeous – in the picture above the paraglider is sailing over Gourdon – but when we got there for lunch we discovered that a loaf of banana bread was NINE Euros. Fuck that. We weren’t about to discover the cost of an actual meal. So we went down to a town we’d passed 10 minutes earlier and had Paella and a “sandwich” for lunch. Go to the flickr site and you’ll see what they called a “sandwich.”

We continued on to one of my favorite towns so far, Tourrettes-sur-Loup, a stunning medieval town that feels strongly Mediterranean where some of the actual Mediterranean cities (like Nice) are lacking. We ran into some women who were taking olive branches into their houses to burn for heat. It’s small enough that people seem to know each other, but big enough that there seems to be a population living there that isn’t reliant on tourism. Maybe the perfect town? Who knows. Most of the pictures above are from Tourrettes-sur-Loup. I think we’ll end up back there. Kim and Adam know the charms of this place.

When I was in elementary school I wanted to be a cartographer – a map maker. I remember specifically in 3rd grade being able to draw all 50 states and a few foreign countries. I had a “what’s there?” wonder about the lines on paper that must have actually existed as real places with smells of smoke or herbs and people whose experiences of life were just different.

In Bellevue in 2001 a friend’s dad drew a map on a little sheet of paper and the next week I flew to London, then went by train to Paris, then Nice, then by boat to Corsica, by bus down the east coast of the island to a little town on the side of the highway and then I walked 5km down to a town by the sea. From there I walked up a hill, took a left and I reached a front door that was somehow exactly where the little sheet of paper said it would be. Halfway around the world. I was sweating furiously because it was the hottest day of the year and I was carrying a suitcase. I remember seeing moths on the walls and there were dogs jumping up and snapping at the moths.

We’re just north of Corsica now and we’ll probably be heading there at some point to fill in different lines on the island.

Something I’ve been loving about having the scooter is that I’m seeing places in a different way. Like instead of making the world smaller the scooter is expanding it adding new dimensions to places I’ve been.

Azure shot some video from the back

I’ve been singing this song – “Salvador Sanchez” by Sun Kil Moon – for 2 weeks now in my head.

The Azure has landed

She’s safe, sound and sleeping.

It was another beautiful day here at the cote d’Azure. I went and bought a helmet for her then picked her up at the airport. She rode on back for our trip back into the city and we wandered around a while. Nice is a dynamic place, but we’ve been here plenty, we’re hanging out and catching up before we’ll move on to smaller towns.

Sentier de la Doue

by Mike

I’m so exhausted. I just arrived in Nice and have ridden over 1500km in the 10 days since I left Paris. Only a few of the days did I get to really spend playing, the rest were spent pushing to get here to meet Azure tomorrow, thank god, I’m ready to touch another person again. I rode through that storm in SW France that caused so much damage, I rode through snowy farmland and mountains and now the beautiful Provencial sun.

One of my favorite experiences was on the Indre River, south of the Loire, where I found a town called Courcay. It’s in a very thick little valley, so small it feels like it was personalized for this town, and in fact the town barely fits – its main road runs a hard zig zag up the West bank and all the buildings on that road are kinda piled on top of each other. As was the common practice, Courcay was built around an intimidating 12th century church that looks as much like a fortress as it does a place of celebration. Maybe not much celebrating went on back then. Maybe more did, I don’t know. The church doesn’t have many windows, anyway, but I love the design, it gets the job done.

Behind the church I saw signs that said, “Sentier de la Doue –>,” so I followed, not knowing what the two important words meant. I was interested in finding the Sentier, whatever it was. The street dead ended after 500m and another sign pointed down the forested riverbank, “Sentier de la Doue.” There was a trail that I assumed lead to the Sentier so I started walking. It was cold and achey and wet in a Pacific Northwest forest kind of way, so I felt right at home walking there. I walked for 5 or 10 minutes and didn’t see any other signs for the Sentier, but the trail was getting interesting – when you poke around rivers in France there’s always the potential for finding something ancient or hidden or quaint or tasty, I’m always excited to find secrets from the past that had been left in the woods.

The trail got thinner, then some stuff appeared on the left – behind wooden fences were a bunch of caves carved into the cliffs. There would be one, then a fence, then another cave, then another fence, and so on, it went on for 10 minutes. I think they might have been caves for storing wine or tools… I don’t know what, really, it could have been anything. Why would people cordon off caves? It seemed like maybe each family from the town had its own, but that’s total speculation. And if so, why so far from town?

Finally I came to a cave where the fence was knocked down and it looked like it hadn’t been in use. I climbed up the wet grass and went inside – it was big enough for a bunch of people to sit and drink, and in fact there was a ring of stones for a firepit. Not much else, but you could probably sleep there. I didn’t.

Back down on the trail I’d forgotten about finding the Sentier and just continued walking, enjoying the potential of each turn. The cliff and the trail pulled up side-by-side right where a spring was gushing from the rocks. The water was clear and very very cold. I finally came to an old property called the “Moulin de la Doue,” which I think means “Mill of the Doue” (Doue still being the mysterious word) and there was this cool grotto against the cliff – a little overhang of rock with a pool of freshwater underneath, and the pool practically glowed green from what looked like underwater ferns.

There was nobody at the mill, and I followed the path a little farther to a dead end. I walked back to my bike never having found the Sentier but loving the walk anyway. When I got back I looked up the words in my dictionary – the Sentier I was looking for, it means, “path.” Sentier de la Doue means “Path of the Gifted.”

About that storm

A fierce storm from the Atlantic Ocean hit southwestern France and northern Spain over the weekend, leaving at least 15 people dead and one million homes without power.

With torrential rains and winds approaching 175 kilometres an hour, the storm was described by weather forecasters as the region’s worst in a decade. [CBC]

Made it to Nice!

Today’s Route

The last two weeks have absolutely thrashed me between the miserable cold and the beauty of this country. I’m physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted and Azure comes in tomorrow and we’re going to get a hotel room and hopefully just lay around for two days. I’m ready to turn off my brain for a while.

If I lived every day like this I’d age fast but live forever. Every day feels like ten and I’ll often think back on a place and wonder when I went through there, and it had been the day before, but hundreds of kilometers back. I’d seen so much in between that the memory had been shaken loose already.

For the last week it’s been literally good day, bad day, good day, bad day, depending on the weather. If Azure weren’t meeting me in Nice I’d have stopped in places for the rainy days and wandered the town, but I had to get here so I pushed through the cold, wet, windy, ugly days. On the scooter, the goodness or badness of a day is multiplied.

Today was the best day yet, though, stunning from start to finish, from Aix-en-Provence (which I really liked) through Provence, through the mountains to the coast. Then I drove up the famous coast from St. Raphael to Cannes, Antibes and finally Nice. It was long, but I’m so happy to be here.

Route of the first two weeks. I’ve driven over 1500 km since leaving Paris. Still in one piece. It’s been so much more difficult than I could have imagined.

Traditions and Services

The ride was ugly today, so you get pictures of food instead.

Written Monday, January 26, 2009

Today’s Route

Well, today could have been better. I was so elated by the change in weather that I should have known it wouldn’t hold. I woke up this morning to the sound of rain and a wet bike and it was so cold, down to 6c for the whole ride, that I was back to the leg slapping and arm flapping the whole ride.

My bike needed oil and I stopped in at a bunch of mechanics who said they don’t do scooters, and of course all the scooter shops are closed on Mondays. Of course. To them it’s totally natural, “Of course all the scooter places are closed. It’s Monday! But we’re open of course because we’re a car place, but of course we don’t change oil for scooters.” Of course. The guy said it wouldn’t be a big deal to ride 200km today, the oil light comes on and you have another 1500km. I’ll get it changed tomorrow when the scooter shops are open.

I crossed the Rhone River delta from Montpellier to Aix-en-Provence today, a really ugly stretch of land that’s been developed and just kinda used over and over. I know this land has been inhabited for as long as the Loire has been, but here somehow they’ve let modern civilization have its way with the land whereas in the Loire and Dordogne they’ve defended tradition and think about beauty with daily decisions. Or maybe they don’t think about beauty as much as they think about doing it the right way, traditionally, and their traditions just happen to be beautiful.

Whenever you enter a town in the Loire (or most of the country, actually) there’s a sign that advertises some of the services they offer: “Courdemanche: Here you’ll find a bakery, a cafe, a restaurant, a bar and a market on Thursdays.” I learned from some Brits (who own the cafe/restaurant/general store/fish licensing office in St. Pierre) that when one of those essential establishments goes under or the proprietor dies, the town will buy the land then give a grant to anyone who buys and runs the business. This way they protect their way of life and ensure that a town has all its services covered. If this doesn’t happen, then that little corner is turned into a house by a foreigner and the town loses its cafe, and after a while it’ll lose its bakery and then people will go to the SuperMarche for their bread and coffee, and the town dies. This has long since passed in Britain while in the US we never really had comparable traditions in our cultural narrative. Maybe in the good ol’ days, but our country is too young, capitalist and ethnically mixed for this to have been very well established. And god forbid we let our government support these services. That sounds like socialism!!

[In fact, the City of Seattle financially helps farmers’ markets that use city land. This is unequivocally a good thing for our city and region (we support farmers from all over the Puget Sound) in terms of economics, civic health and actual physical health. We lost the Sonics, which hurts, and apparently people were pissed about the City fumbling the recent storms, but when it comes to things like pushing a youth violence initiative, trying car-free Sundays, invigorating civic life in South Lake Union and instituting fees for plastic bags (why not just ban them?) our Mayor is focusing on improving our way of life instead of just our economics. It will be interesting to see how his re-election plays out considering that these things aren’t generally appreciated by the American populace.]

According to those Brits, the cafe owners, socialist ties runs deep in the French countryside, people have a healthy mistrust of the central government. It reminds me of American smalltown folk, as both groups would be unhappy to learn.

While we’re on the subject of services and tradition, I’m visiting a lot of McDonald’s on this trip for a very simple reason: they all offer free, unlimited WiFi. The McDonald’s are, for the most part, pushed to the outskirts of cities where they can’t be eyesores, and they’re not nearly as ubiquitous as in the US (you wouldn’t find one in a small town) but if I find one on a day I haven’t checked my email I almost always go in and buy a hot chocolate and update the blog or chat with Azure if she’s on. McDonald’s has a great niche. There’s often a few other people using their laptops in there in the same way you’d find people at cafes in Seattle, young professionals who need to get online but also want to get out of the house, and since the French are so behind on all things Internet, the most reliable WiFi is at “MacDoh”. Nobody really wants to go to McDonald’s, though, so maybe someday local cities and towns will start offering this service in recognition of a small change to the way of life.

Snow to Sea

Written Sunday, January 25, 2009

Today’s Route

I left foggy Villefranche on a road that winds up the side of a hill, one wall of the valley that protects the town. As I climbed I got above the clouds for my first full blue-skied sunny day of the trip, a day I’d been anticipating for a long time. Behind me the fog was like soup filling the cracks between the hills, pouring over all the towns down there. Ahead were round, green fields against the sky.

And then there was a little white on the green.

And as I kept going it got whiter, then totally white but I could still see green to the south from these hills, so I felt the better riding couldn’t be too far ahead. The hills are high bumps and you feel like you’re on top of the earth in the way you feel on top of the water when you’re water skiing, so from these bumps on such a clear day I could see miles in any direction. It was clear because a huge storm passed through on Saturday, which probably also left the snow. Ahead I could see more and more snow, which meant cold, which meant caution and it meant that I had to slap my hands against my legs to keep circulation going, and I had to flap my elbows like wings and wiggle my toes while I was driving.

I finally stopped in a boulangerie and got a quiche and an apple tartlette for breakfast, then a hot chocolate for my hands (and nothing for my toes). It was Sunday morning and every time an old man walked into the cafe from the bright morning he shook the hand of everyone he knew, which was everyone but me, and they’d talk French to each other. I’m kinda a scene in every shop I visit, I’m the guy who makes the needle scratch off the record when he walks into a place and everyone looks up because I’m sporting either a) a full-on “I’m gonna rob this place” style ski mask or b) a full-on “I’m gonna rob this place” style mohawk. Not to mention I’m soaking wet, usually, and am wearing five layers. I’ve learned to own it – walk in, sit down, start talking, pretend you’re normal. I asked one of the old men, “I’m going to Milau (‘me-oh’), is there more snow there than here?” “Oh no, not in Milau, it’s better there.” I asked a couple more people along the way, same answer.

In fact I should have been asking, “is there more snow ON THE WAY to Milau?” in which case the answer would have been, “Oh yes, you can’t go that way.”

By the time I figured this out, trembling with aching hands and numb fingers, I was asking snowplow drivers. “Oh yes,” they said. “You can’t go that way.”

So I had to turn around in Baraqueville (yes we did!) and I headed both down and south to the green. I was watching the temperature reading on the bike the whole way, elated with each changing number… 2… 3… 4… 6… 9!… 11!… 14!! Fifty-five degrees has never felt so good! It meant I no longer needed to wiggle my toes or slap my legs or breathe toward my ears! I shot through a small mountain range and by the time I descended I had reached the Mediterranean – in one day I had left behind the traditional French-feeling parts of France and had made it to the coast, which feels more modern and developed.

After about an hour of driving in circles, I finally found my hostel in Montpellier, a very cool town with an aqueduct thing that comes right into the center. I had a gyro and fell asleep at 9.

This is more for me than you

I do this thing where I try to fold meaning into what I’m writing about, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I wanted to try to explain how I felt about the fences and ruins because they actually had a huge impact on me, but I felt like anything I wrote would come across as reaching for something that wasn’t there and I didn’t want to give the structures to you with this weird overanalysis attached. They were just fences, afterall. But they were something more than that and now I want to try to get it down so maybe I’ll better understand the experience when I read this in the future after I’ve forgotten everything.

The first thing to understand is how isolated they were in a country that’s so populated and in a region continuously inhabited since ancient times. For the last week, every 10 minutes I’d drive through a town, but here I drove for 45 minutes without really seeing anyone, maybe passing one or two cars. There were occasionally some buildings, but no life really. It reminded me of Alaska, especially as it was snowing sideways at the time.

The structures aren’t ancient in my mind – that word reminds me of some movement of people, some civilization like Rome or Greece. I felt that these fences were the work of individuals who were living in the area and put them up for themselves. But I also doubt they’re prehistoric.

The sense I gather from them is that they’re expressions of people from a timeless era, of a pre-modern, non-progress-based time. They felt -unconscious- to me, and I think that might be the word I was looking for when I wrote, “Maybe there’s a word for this.” Nietzsche wrote about how being able to forget was the key to living in the present – you’re filled with wonder at the smallest things if they’re new to your consciousness. I don’t know if a circle-based time meant remembering everything or forgetting everything. Living in a circle, though, is definitely a more animalistic way of experiencing time.

Maybe there’s a word for this

Written Saturday, January 24, 2009. (This was the day of the enormous storm that slammed SW France, where I was riding. That would explain the sideways rain and snow.)

Today’s Route

It was such a strange stretch of road today between two rivers, the Dordogne and the Lot. For the entire 50km there were old stone fences lining the road and crisscrossing the land, but there wasn’t anybody around. There are only a couple towns between the rivers, but the fences went well beyond into the woods or off across fields. They’d been melting, and some had crumbled or fallen while others still stood well. Many fences had deep green moss growing, covering them like rugs. I drove by these stone fences for an hour without seeing more than a handful of other people. There were other structures too, back in the woods there were unmarked ruins of houses just left to decay until they’ll start looking like others – mounds of stones blanketed by that thick moss.

Three-foot-high huts made of those melting stones occasionally popped up on the road. They looked like little shrines though I didn’t see any with religious material, nor do they keep many shrines in protestant countries (though how long have protestants been around?). The huts could have been tool sheds or mile markers or places to leave information for other travelers at some point.

The strangest thing I saw was something I think was modern: a stone table with a pig carved on the front. It was at the very top of a hill back in the woods and I just caught a glimpse as I rode by, so I pulled a u-turn and followed the tracks back off the road. You can see in the picture above – it doesn’t look like anything else in this region, and it looks too exact to be old. So why is it there? It could be a spot where people clean their kill after hunting, but it looks way too intentional for that (besides, don’t you clean a kill by hanging it?). It really looks like an alter to me. What do you think?

The towns here are gorgeous medieval towns, low on the rivers or high on the hills. They have names that aren’t tradtional French, like Uzeches and Gramat and Cajarc and Puyjuarrail. Then there are a lot with the suffix -ac like Espedaillac, Marcilhac and Vayrac, all towns I went through. Marcilhac is the town pictured above. It’s on the river Cele, which is flooding, and across the river is a towering cliff that must block sunlight seven months a year. I don’t know why anyone would live here for these seven months.

Between these rivers I get the feeling that I’m not in France anymore but somewhere and sometime else.

I’m updating from McDonald’s

They have free wifi at every location.

I’m in a town called Villefranche down near Toulouse, it’s pretty here, just had a long drive through a storm with snow blowing sideways and everything. (it was about 4 degrees Celsius the whole ride though). My room at the hostel has a shower and I took a hot shower for 20 minutes.

Almost to the Med!

I’ll write up a more informative post later tonight and post it tomorrow, but now I need to get back to the room because I don’t want to ride in the dark nor be at McDonald’s anymore.

Everyone has a chateau

Written Friday, January 23.

Friday’s Route

Azure and her cousins found some magic when they were caretakers at a beautiful chateau near Poitiers in 2002. For three months they cooked in the immense kitchen and played cards and drank (etc.) by the fire and they listened to music over the occasional “flushing” of the chateau, which I still don’t understand. Neighbors stopped by with homemade Pineau and once a hunter dropped off a pigeon shot on the chateau property. Azure chopped off its head.

A statue of Joan of Arc, who stayed a night in the same room Kim & Adam slept, stands in the 50-something acres of French woods. The town church makes up part of the property’s wall, and on Sundays the bells ring and you can hear people singing. Azure, Kim and Adam had this all to themselves that fall. I was lucky enough to share it with them for a week.

Azure and I have decided that it’s impossible to recreate magical experiences, and you can only be let down when the attempt doesn’t match the original product, because of course it won’t. So it’s best to just let it be what it was and try to conjure new magic in new places. However, today I visited the chateau and it was exactly the same as I remember it.

I write about this chateau in France and you might think, “Holy smokes! A chateau!” but as I’ve been touring I’ve been discovering that there must be thousands of chateaux in the French countryside, sometimes on a small road I’ll be driving and out of nowhere rises an enormous lawn behind a 10-foot-high iron fence and at the top of the hill there’s a proper castle, five stories, towers and turrets and everything, but not a sign to be found, like it’s normal or something. They’re just there.

As an American I expect superlatives, I find myself wanting to read, “This chateau was constructed in the 9th century by a count who later served as counsel to Charlemagne…” or something like that. Something that tacks it to our narratives. The little sign outside Azure, Kim and Adam’s chateau at St. Julien L’Ars has a few words about its construction, then a note about one of the previous owners that goes something like this, “The only thing notable about her is that she died in a famous Parisian market fire in 1890.”

History is part of life here, there’s so much of it. Each place has too many stories to tack each one to an authoritative cultural narrative. We don’t have stories in the US like this – I’m sure there were native settlements where Factoria now “stands” but there aren’t any plaques, it’s not part of our heritage, it’s not part of our daily lives to use the steps that have been used by the past. So when I see a sign that says, “Roman bridge –>” I get all excited because history’s always been something separate, intangible and illustrious in my mind, like Plato’s Forms. But here it feels the stories and objects suffice, free of historical relevance, they don’t need to be connected to our narratives to have their place. The people living today will add their trash to the heaps that have been left before, right on top, until next year. Even if that lady didn’t do anything that the sign maker considered notable except die in a fire, I’m sure she had a life with love and pain and there were people whose own lives were changed when she died early. History is taught from the top down, though time is more like a swamp where everything consumes everything else over and over again. Who’s to say what’s important?

In Salorno, Italy I visited a castle on a hill that had been bought, renovated and reopened as a tourist attraction to “add to the local culture” or something like that. One of the local guys said that before it was renovated they used to go up there and sit on the walls and drink all night, but now it’s fenced off and the townspeople don’t have access unless they pay.

Blogs totally change the depth of the historical record, and I have to admit that when I write I’m keeping in mind that this is a record of my life that might be read 1000 years from now. Even if it’s never anything historically important, or if it’s only one of thousands of chateaux, it doesn’t need recognition to have value.

My words are spit back

Written on Thursday, Jan 22.

Thursday’s Route

The universe spit my words back at me today as I battled rain and wind to get halfway to my goal, as I battled the awful Poitiers suburbs to find my awful Poitiers hostel, and as I battled to keep my head while waiting five hours for the reception to open. I said this morning that I was much more a global person and didn’t need the nutrients from home… and today I was as homesick as I’ve been in a long, long time.
There are two other times my words have been spit back at me on this trip:
Buddhism says that desire is the root of suffering. But if I was content with everything I had – a camera, a scooter, time and my journal – then had I defeated desire by giving myself what I wanted? The next day I took the camera to be cleaned and for a whole day I was sure the woman ruined the sensor (and thus the camera). So I learned my buddhist lesson – as long as you’re attached to material things you’re susceptible to their quirks. And even more basic, having is wanting.
Earlier in the trip I wrote about how great it is to have the most profound form of freedom – freedom of identity. But right now I’m finding that with anonymity come some awful things. Nobody really cares to understand you, and they don’t care to be understood by you. It’s very lonely when you’re unhappy. Kurt Vonnegut said that loneliness is the most widespread disease in America, and today when I was writing about it I kept thinking of Holden Caulfield.

French Dirt, the blog post

Notice the reflection in the creme caramel



That last one on the right is eight beds shaped like a star. You think that person has an opinion?

Today’s Route

I ate kidneys today, which aren’t as good as they sound, but the salad beforehand had grilled foie gras on top, and there was a creamy syrupy creme caramel at the end of it all. So that was the middle of the day. The kidneys have affected me until now, when I’m writing this the next morning.
In the town of Cormery I walked up the river along this little dirt road that went through a bunch of gardens, some of them with stone walls protecting them from other gardeners, I guess. And I came across a guy who was standing in a patch pulling up leeks, slicing off the root end and the weathered tops, then skinning the outside. The land was owned by the old people in the house behind us up the hill, it was a lot of land and I asked what two old people would do with so many leeks, he had a wheelbarrow full. “Soups, stews…” Leeks are everywhere right now, in all the little gardens I see.
He said that they also grow carrots, cabbage, spinach, brussel sprouts and strawberries in the summer. He’s their gardener – a full time job – and he’s lived in Cormery his whole life.

On the scooter I started thinking about leeks. Here’s what they are:
They are terrestrial. They take nutrients from the soil at their roots.
They are celestial. They take energy from the sun.
They are global. They collect water that has traces of the environment from hundreds of miles away, the air and underground.

If they were human it would be body (terrestrial), mind (global) and soul (celestial). And the towns I keep driving through are like little bulls-eyes with the fields on the outside (terrestrial), then the actual town is the vessel for knowledge (global) and at the heart of each town is the church (celestial). (Religion being a cultural expression of universal human spirituality).

We have these things in us in different ratios, but I’m mostly a global person in these terms. I like politics, I like to acquire knowledge from abroad. Being global is more important to me than my spirituality or taking nutrients from my home (sorry, it’s true), though not one of the three could exist without the other, I’m sure.

What about you??

I’m leaving Tours today after 4 nights and am now heading south, possibly to Poitiers or Angouleme, definitely to St. Julien L’Ars.

Caveaux et Eglises

Today’s Route

by Mike

For lunch I had pork chops in gravy with white beans and green beans. A Brit told me that the French are very particular about their sides – he’d serve them a plate and they’d say, “Oh, you decided to make potatoes with this. Interesting.” Or some dishes always take carrots for sides, never green beans, but other dishes vice versa. So pork chops take green beans. Check.
The restaurant had an indulgent buffet of appetizers that included pate, fois gras, salami, proscuito, marinated mushrooms, shredded carrots in sauce, potato salad… and on and on. The meal came with a carafe of red wine, dessert (I had chocolate mousse) and a cafe for 11 Euros, fixed.
This was a small town. I mean, really small, and the towns around it were smaller and all the people from all those towns came to this town to eat. The men in the cafe were laborers with dirty or painty pants, one guy with rulers and a pencil sticking out, probably a carpenter, everyone wearing boots and drinking a couple glasses of red wine with lunch. I felt at home with them, though I know I stuck out. I took pictures of my food, for gods sake, and I’m sure that doesn’t go with a pork chop.
These people are cave dwellers, and I’m not trying to be cute, they literally dwell in caves. The hills are made of chalk and people in prehistoric times dug out caves that looked out over the valley and since then they’ve been inhabited by the the laborers of the Loir with whom I ate lunch. Many people have put windows or doors at the entryway, some have built houses in front of the caves, but the structures back up into the hill and the trees above creep out onto the rooves. Many caves are used for garages, and – as you can imagine for a location that’s based on safety – some run back into the hills and join up with others to form underground passages. Legally, people can’t dig up or to either side (property lines go underground) but they can dig back, and apparently you can still see people carrying out loads of white rock.
One town was Troo, a strange little place with an enormous church and my favorite place name of the trip so far. Troo means, “hole.” I asked a Quebecoise to write down a bunch of swearwords for me today, and I was delighted to see one of them included the word, “troo.”
Also today I went on a church picture taking rampage, for some reason. My favorite was at this town called “Vieux Bourg” which I think means “old town” (I also went through a town called Villebourg, which means “town town”) where the church was from the 10th century. On my way there I was wondering what a 10th century church would look like. Would it be showy or plain? Would it be broken down? Probably not a ton of windows, but would they have added any over the centuries? Here’s what I came across:

I love this church, it’s totally adequate. There were guys who were doing some masonry work on the base, probably guys who earlier had lunch at some local town and wondered why the guy with the mohawk was taking pictures of his pork chops. They said, “Bon jour” as I walked by.

Some Videos

Time Lapse of Clouds in Tours
Time Lapse of Traffic in Paris
A rainbow in the Loir Valley
The view from a hill over Chartres-sur-le-Loir
A windy field

Tours

Today’s Route

by Mike

My experiences are outpacing my ability to analyze them. Today I escaped a rain storm by taking refuge at this cafe in the smallest town, St Pierre, somewhere an hour north of Tours, and when I sat down I had so much to write in my journal that I couldn’t start.
I’d just come north on a small highway until I veered off to wander through hill towns, these wet stone villages resting around churches between hills. The churches are ancient, some go back to the 10th century, and their stone walls are melting from the generations of rain. Leaving the town you go up on top of the hills where there are fields that feed the towns (and probably the cities, now), then back down into another wet valley with its stone village.
There are chateaux everywhere – at one point I stopped and took this video of a bend in the road where there were three chateaux within sight, and wasn’t a noteworthy spot, not even a mark on the map. Each is unique, they’re all beautiful, they’re all enormous. But they’re built for the rich, too, and down the road in the valleys where people live next to streams there are small patches of dirt turned into neat vegetable gardens, all leafy greens and onion stalks at this time of year, but mostly dirt. I prefer this version of wealth – vegetables and dirt… but chateaux make for better pictures.
In the village of Marcon (cedilla) I ran into a bunch of school kids lined up to go back to class and we totally made each other’s days. They were excited to see a real scooter in their town with a foreign guy dressed in all black, while I was excited to see some real French school children like out of a romantic comedy. We all smiled and waved and yelled, “Au revoir! Au revoir!”
I was riding through a long stretch of cold woods when the rain started, and I bolted into the little cafe to find a fire just getting warm, I think they started it specifically for me to dry my gloves and coat. I told them I was hungry, and they served me even though they were stunned to find anyone wanted to eat after 2pm. They’re stuck in their ways, here, which protects the quality of life they’ve developed. I had chicken gizzards with potatoes & chives as a starter, then a tomato stuffed with spiced beef for the main. A cheese plate followed, and I had hot chocolate on either side of the meal.
The lady who owns the cafe told me about all these amazing little towns and archeological sites that were just beyond where we were, but it was 4 and the sun sets at 5:30, so I had to set off for Tours. But I reserved another night here at the hostel, and I’ll be back for Round 2 tomorrow.
I drove home while the sun sprayed orange light like water on the fields. When I finally got near Tours there was TRAFFIC (for most of the day I’d been alone on the road) but as a scooter in Europe I can pass all the cars to get to the front of stop lights or through traffic. On the last bridge into town I rode between two lanes all the way across the Loire, then pulled in front of a policeman (gendarmerie) to kinda test my luck, to see if what I did was legal. He didn’t give it a second look. I took a right up the bank and parked my scooter in front of the hostel.

More photos from the first days

We bought Kim & Adam’s old camera and it’s amazingly fun to use. Here are some of the first pictures:

I wanted to compare cameras, so I took these shots twice… the first is our little Cannon SD770 point and shoot. The second is our new Cannon 5D DSLR.

What do you think of the difference?

Don’t get me wrong – I love our SD770 – I think it might be the best point and shoot I’ve ever owned. But the pictures don’t hold a candle to the ones from the 5D, a mon avis.

This is how I roll

Many things running through my head today as I was riding. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing.” That was one. The other was this: “Nobody at home knows where I am, nobody here knows who I am.” Freedom of identity, the reason so many kids feel so changed by their backpacking trips abroad. We can recreate ourselves when we’re away from the forces that shaped us at home.

And I love that I could be anywhere right now and nobody knows the difference. That being said…

Today’s Route

I’m in Tours, a city on the Loire River in the middle of France. It’s a really cool little place, with plenty of pedestrian streets, a lot of inviting bars, lots of young people (there must be a university here) and just a good vibe overall. Very lively.

Tonight I sat in a bar and wrote in my journal about the day and I got a chocolat chaud for a couple Euros. When I dropped the sugar cube in, a puff of steam popped out of the foam.

(The guy in the background was the gay bartender who had a thing for me. Who am I to not return flirtation?)

They do everything better here, and it hits you at every meal – the cheese in the picture above is the best cheese I’ve had since I was last in France. The bread has toasted sunflower seeds with a complex flavor we’d never associate with bread. At the same boulangerie, I got a whiskey truffle (30 cents!) which was perfectly bitter and powdery on the outside. The chocolate shell CRUNCHED, and the whiskey mousse on the inside melted on my tongue. It was crazy good. It was worth the cost of the scooter. I should have bought the tray.

Other notes:
– I got 10 liters of gas (for 10 Euros) and I’ll probably go 250 km on it… can someone figure out the mpg for me?
– I had a tarte aux pommes for breakfast as the sun was “rising” in Rambouillet (it was raining hard). Then I had an egg mcmuffin in Chartres when I discovered that McDonald’s has free wifi.
– Lunch and dinner were the same – that sunflower baguette with cheese and sausage. The sausage has cheese in it too.
– I rode in the wind and rain this morning and anticipated a long, painful day, but by the afternoon it was sunny and windy.
– Here’s a video from the beginning of my ride.

I’m spending two nights here in Tours – the Loire Valley is a Unesco World Heritage site, so I’m going to spend tomorrow on the scooter with our good camera trying to capture some of it.

A bientot.