Cross this one off the list. My girlfriend Cindy and I spent a week in Paris and a week wandering around the northwest coast. We were in St. Malo for four days, camping on a hill which overlooked the wreckage of the naval fortresses set along the coastline. It was FREEZING. May is not the time to camp in the path of heavy winds blowing in off the ocean.
In general, the weather was ridiculous. The only day of sun we had was our last day in Paris, when we had to take the Chunnel to London at 10:30 in the morning. We celebrated the sunshine by tearing through the Metro in full luggage trying to get to the right train station in time. We barely made it before they started forming the line that stretched across two provinces and an entire hour of non-stop thrill-packed boredom. THAT was vacation time well spent.
Did I mention the Eiffel Tower was closed while we were there? Some kind of elevator strike. And those French are so touchy when you start screaming obscenities at a national monument.
We did have a LOT of good food, including pain au chocolat (bread with chocolate baked inside), lapin (rabbit), escargot, moules et frites (mussels with fries...go figure), crepes (crepes, duh...I'll go into that later), and baguettes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacktime, naptime, smoke breaks and any other time you're feeling a little down!
The disaster with the crepes happened in St. Malo and requires a little background before it can be told. First of all, we left Paris for the city of Tours in the mistaken belief that we were going to Chenonceaux, a chateau (castle) near the city. (I repeat these terms in French as well as English not because I think you're an idiot, although I do, but because I believe clarity should come first and continuity a far, far distant second.) Perhaps because of the FLAWLESS mass transportation in Paris (I have forsaken Christianity and turned my eyes to glory of the One True Metro), we were under the impression that we could get to Chenonceaux without actually buying a car. However, the last bus to the chateau left at 11:30 a.m., a full hour and a half PRIOR to the arrival of our train. Taking a taxi would have cost 250 francs, which, for you non-math types is the equivalent of SEVERAL HUNDRED MILLION U.S. dollars! (No, wait...that can't be right: carry the two, drop the decimal point, divide by x as delta t approaches infinity...hmm, let's just say it was more than we wanted to spend.)
So we're sitting in Tours, eating some rather dubious oeuf et jambon (egg and ham) sandwiches and coming to the unsettling conclusion that one mean-spirited bus has just destroyed a whole day of our itinerary (we shot out the tires later, but that's beyond the scope of this story). Eventually, we decided to skip Tours entirely and continue on to St. Malo, but not before Cindy pulled a muscle in her back trying to put her bag into a consigne a louer (locker for rent). Keep in mind that I tore the fascia in my lower back in January by hitting a ball much too hard for the human eye to see...it will become relevant shortly.
We have some excellent pictures of the back of the seat in front of us on the train where we spent the ENTIRE DAY travelling to St. Malo. There was a brief stop in Rennes, where we had a chance to inhale some quality pollution while we waited, although on a much smaller scale than the black and purple air-sod that makes walking in Paris so enjoyable. Finally, at 8:30, we reached St. Malo, a town with the curious custom of welcoming visitors by closing the damn train station a half hour before the last train arrives. No lockers, very rudimentary restroom facilities (let me just say that the whole 'hole in the floor' concept has gotten entirely out of hand in Europe), and, best of all, the buses only run until 8:10 on that particular Thursday, which is celebrated as 'Day of Hell You Couldn't Possibly Imagine' in some regions of the country.
Now, all of the lockers at the train stations in Paris were closed due to bombings during the previous summer, which had pretty severely curtailed our plans to stash our gear in them during the day and then camp in the Bois de Bologne (Park of Bologne? who knows?) rather than rent a hotel room at night. Since we had to stay in hotels in Paris all but one night (which I don't even want to MENTION except for the word 'sub-arctic'), we decided to save money by camping the entire time we were in St. Malo. Lest you think that this was a brilliant plan, let me remind you that the train station was already closed by the time we arrived and the only lockers within five hundred kilometers were INSIDE THE TRAIN STATION. (Don't ask how we disembarked from the train if the train station was closed, it's complicated and I'm not going to draw you a picture, so take my word for it.)
Okay, so let's go camping. Of course, we had to deduce the whereabouts of the campsite from the map at the bus stop, which showed only bus routes and NO street names. We headed off in the right direction, with a backpack apiece and a giant duffel bag filled with the tent, some shoes, a bunch of plastic bags, our sleeping bags, and twenty mini-packs of toilet paper that my mom forced on me against my will (wow, was I wrong about that). Remember now, one of us has just sustained a back injury due to heavy lifting. I don't mean to give away the ending, but I get to carry almost all the bags to the campsite, which turns out to be--after factoring in time spent getting lost and arguing over who got us lost anyway--about two hours away. Luckily, it doesn't get entirely dark in St. Malo in the spring until around 11:00, so we still had time to put up the tent and for me to do stretching exercises to keep my back from seizing up before lights out.
Damn, we forgot to eat. Okay, no need to panic, there were a couple of restaurants down by the shoreline. Of course, we had already set up the tent and we couldn't just leave it unattended while we went to find a restaurant. The trail mix was already gone and we forgot to restock the petit beurre (little butter cookies) before we left Paris. Finally, we solved the problem by sending me out to get food, although I wonder in retrospect who first suggested the idea.
I think it was this particular night that I came to the conclusion that the main difference between France and the U.S. is the American concept of restaurants which serve food 'to go'. The first restaurant I walked into had no customers and one extremely ornery proprietress. She didn't like me in the first place and the situation wasn't improved by the fact that the literal translation of 'food to go' in French is apparently 'your hair is on upside-down'. When she finally DID understand what I wanted, she shook her head curtly and shooed me out the door with a fondness generally reserved for raccoons in the dumpster.
The only other place with lights on along the whole coast was a crepe joint (the region around St. Malo is famous for crepes). I walked in and I guess my fake French limp wasn't fooling anyone, because the whole place went dead silent. This would have been more impressive if the place had been larger than my living room, but still, having six tables of non-English-speaking locals staring at you is a little disconcerting. Plus, all of them were drinking shots of, I don't know, crepe-whiskey or something. Luckily, the waitress was very friendly and patient as I tried to explain what I needed. "Food," I said. "To take." When she finally got it, she had to ask the gruff, irascible cook behind the lunch counter if they could allow such an extreme breach of protocol. He made several jokes at my expense which the customers found uproariously funny, but handed me a menu. I ordered two ham, egg and butter crepes and then stood around for five minutes trying to look like I wasn't an American while he whipped them up. Then I got the hell out of there.
Bottom line: best crepes of all time. Unfortunately, I was too nonplussed to set foot in there again, so we had sandwiches for the rest of our stay in St. Malo.
Chip Howland
howland@skypoint.com