Meanderings at the roadside

There are times on this trip—a lot of them—that I get wound up tighter than a cheap watch. Mostly to do with getting there (wherever “there” is). I don’t know whether I’m terrified of getting lost, or staying lost, or losing the plot, or losing time, or all of the above.

Probably all of the above.

Orléans cathedral vaults with stained glass light.

Sunday I was retracing my steps (or wheel revolutions) from Orléans to Tours, and then on to Poitiers. It was cold and chucking down rain and Jill had put me on to the damned Plague again. I pulled off at the Ste Maure de Touraine exit to take a D-road (usually one lane of traffic in each direction, going 50km through the towns, etc.), and hell when you get behind a commercial vehicle. Ste Maure turns out to have been where I stopped to have my lunch 30 years ago on the way to Poitiers. I ate at a park where two guys were planting a border of yellow pansies.

At one point I saw some fellow standing on a side road, in the drenching rain, noted that le Lapin Gris was telling me it was 9°C, and thinking, “Man, I feel your pain.”

When you’re traveling by bike and on a budget, if the weather is foul you have nowhere to go to get out of it. Hostels didn’t typically open until around 1700. At one point I ate my lunch in the passageway between two buildings, at least out of the rain, but still cold and really dark.

It was around this time I commented on Montaigne’s essay, “On Education”. He was describing a deep sort of friendship, and saying that one can only have one friend of that sort.

Of course, he also said women aren’t capable of that sort of friendship in the first place.

Very disappointed in Michel, I was.

Well, anyhow, Poitiers was a high point both then and now. It’s one of those fortress towns, built originally on a rise with stone walls—thick, defensible stone walls—between the good citizens and whatever would endanger them from the outside.

It’s been the scene of several battles over the centuries. But perhaps the most notable was in 732 when Charles Martel turned back the tide of the Moorish invasion, beginning the drive that would culminate in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella (known as los reyes Católicos) pushed the Arabs off Spanish soil.

The Jews went at the same time, but that’s another story.

Back in ’79 I walked along a stretch of those parapets and looked in the distance to try to make out the medieval battle. I thought I saw some pennants flying and heard the clash of arms; but that might have been a somewhat overactive imagination. Not that much of a stretch, though, if you don’t focus too closely on the present and the near distance.

This time I rambled through the old town, which was quiet because on Sundays not very much is open.

Gargoyle on Poitiers church.

The Auberge de Jeunesse where I stayed back then had two “classes” of residents. If you paid a fee you got served a meal that looked pretty hearty. If you didn’t you had to go to a kitchen that was out around the back, where there were about two pans and a stove of questionable capacity. I was there with the other riff-raff, mostly guys from Ghana, Morocco and Zaire (as it was known then). The Ghanaian had been a fisherman for Star-Kist, but was now looking for work in France as a diesel mechanic.

This time I stayed in a hotel in the old town and had a fine dinner of moules marinieres and Sancerre. Splurged on profiteroles, although I ate only one of the three. It was good, but I’d ordered them just to splurge, and one was quite enough for that purpose. Sadly, you cannot pack up leftover profiteroles to take home with you for breakfast..

Yesterday I stopped off in Ruffec, a small town where I spent the night in the youth hostel back then. Ruffec is important to e because after I got settled in the hostel I took a walk around the town. And I came upon this beautiful garden hidden away in a courtyard. A woman came out from a doorway and called to me; I thought she was shooing me away, so I scooted. But she got another pedestrian to call to me (“chaperon rouge”—as I was wearing my red plastic rain poncho).

I said I was just admiring her garden and she invited me in for a closer look. She showed me around it, and it really was lovely. Very small but lots of different plants that all seemed to co-exist very well.

Madame Bertrand spoke with me for maybe a couple of hours. Her father had a lot of sayings:

In a garden you should plant pretty and useful things.

In a war you need infantry to occupy land.

(Her father was obviously no fool.)

She and her sister (both around 65-70) ran the family business distributing liquor but she very much enjoyed working in that garden.

She talked a lot about the wars. During World War II, her husband had been taken prisoner by the Germans. She didn’t see him for a long time. And he had died some years back.

She’d had a pen pal before the war from Orange County (California).And she wrote to her in English. That correspondence of course was cut off in 1942 (after the US entered the war). She said that she forgot all her English during the war because she was forced to learn German, and German and English are similar languages.

Fountain Ruffec.

So yesterday I stopped a while in Ruffec and walked about. I had no hope of finding Mme Bertrand’s place, but I wanted to thank the town for being very good to me back then.

(I was the only person staying at the AJ, and the fellow who ran it actually came back in the evening to turn on the heat in my room. Now, that’s living the dream!)

Likewise, I stopped off in Angoulême yesterday. By the time I got there in ’79, I needed a bit of a break, and enough time so my clothes would dry if I washed them. By then I’d been on the road ten days and those things needed a blow torch. Angoulême is another of those walled, fortress towns, and I’d actually considered staying there on this trip, but in the end only had lunch there.

Getting into Bordeaux was a bit of a bummer. Jill suddenly went silent, and the sat-nav flat out lied to me, saying there were no languages to be found for spoken directions. Let me just say that if getting around cities with medieval warrens of streets is hard with spoken instructions, it’s worse without them.

(Somehow she miraculously came back online today. Don’t know what to make of that.)

And yes. I am afraid of being lost, although I don’t know why. It’s never that hard to put yourself right after a misadventure. As for losing time—well, I am rather time-sensitive. That’s more to do with my entire life, and how much of it I’ve lost, than spending an extra 30 minutes on the road because I took a wrong turning.

And yet, it does make me anxious…

(Posted 0854 Wednesday at Bordeaux)