A quick update.. as we finally found an Internet cafe, but it is late in the evening.
Arles, France - nice roman ruins and a museum showing the town in Roman and medieval times, weird French food, good French food, dirty streets, good weather
Carcassonne, France - rebuilt medieval double walled city (rebuilt in 1840’s, inner wall is Roman, outer is medieval), touristy as you might think, wonderful to walk the outer wall at night, good place for a beer under the oak trees in the evening, Cassoulet (regional stew of white beans and meat, is one of the recipes New Orleans must have collected as a basis for their Creole rich sauces - yum, uh-oh, that’s too good to be healthy).
A set of Brussel tourists gave us a lift to the Europcar rental agency where they were returning their car. A nice older couple that had stories about Italy, EasyJet, Brussels and France. Everyone in France has been extremely friendly, sort of goes against any view we had of the old guard French attitude.
True to form, though, France is the land of beaurocracy. True life tale, we watched our check-out clerk press the return key on a credit card validation machine that very obviously did not have a functioning phone connection for 20 minutes. After 15 minutes (we are getting patient on this trip), we asked her if she could call to either reset the machine or verbally validate our credit card.. oh, no, nothing she could do, she assured us. I finally gave up and stood in the Hertz counter line, another 20 minutes just as I get to the counter, she had finally called (we assume the hesitation may be due to too many of these calls?) and the machine was reset. Voila! as they say. Unfortunately, she did us a favor and upgraded us to a luxury car.. big cars just don´t fit in small Europe parking spots, but folks looked impressed at the Peugeot we were driving. Large cars seem to be making a splash in Europe. We were starting to see SUVs and other bulging automobiles. As for the future rentals, despite the suprisingly great pickup and ‘go’ of the huge diesel (Derrell said he was impressed) and the great impression we were making as we drove, we decided to stick with a compact to allow us to fold into the tiny streets and parking slots that teeter on the edge of not existing if you don’t stare at them correctly. No more 25-point turns to get out of tight spaces with a manual? Now that will be true luxury.
Beach time in Collioure, France. A sleepy beach town with many well tanned families (yes, topless is still in vogue, along with bottomless tykes). The town was overrun with white haired little old ladies that were roving in small packs, oversampling the vins and cheeses and giggling (quite an intimidating sight when a gang weaves at you down an alleyway). The town had just as many yappy dogs, good scenery, castles in the distance, and one token windmill. Everything rolls up and goes to bed by 9pm, so we got quite a bit of sleep. Derrell did his first stint at trying to become brown this summer. I helped the tanning session by sitting in the shade with sunblock 30 and ignoring the pesky sunrays, no point in going against genetics, I say.
Took a day trip to Figueres, Spain and checked out the Dali museum. That was one strange dude. Lots of dripping clocks, elephants on stalky legs and random weirdness that looked like art installations at Burning Man.
Toulouse, France - not much going on here, except we tucked ourselves into a Holiday Inn and enjoyed the Americaness of the hotel. Shower that didn’t run out over the floor- perfect!, room service, a large TV with BBC and CCN (made by Finlux.. yes, a FIN-nish company), and quiet. Airbus is a main employer near where we were staying and the hotel was filled with pilots (of course drinking at the bar), conference goers in dark suits (made us appreciate not being corporate), and one token American (extremely loud, no information about Europe in his miniscule brain, a true stereotypical goofball that was torturing his French host immensely… again we were relieved at having nothing to do with business sales).
Today we just arrived at Malaga, Spain - a beach town.. with an Internet cafe! Nice hotel, we can see the ocean from the top floor balcony. Hazy day, nice people. Our spanish is rusty, uh-oh. Nice flight over on Air Nostrum and Iberia through Madrid. Actually had good-nearing-on-great food, real silverware (plastic knife, of course), newspapers handed out, and the airline is making money. An airline making money? Isn’t that nigh impossible?
We will be off-line for a bit (or so we assume). A ‘bit’ being defined as 1 to 2 weeks. We are headed to Morocco for the World Sacred Music Festival tomorrow, not sure if Fez will have an Internet connection. Or if it does, would the keyboards be in French or Arabic? Both are rather impossible to type on, if you ask my QWERTY fingers. We’ll give it our best shot, but if the next post comes out as “ñ´´}ç\ºº”, hmm.., you’ll know why. Adios, Ciao, et Au revoir!
