We’ve spent most of the day cocooned in the tent, Heather sleeping and me alternating between reading and staring at the tent walls. I’ve been reading through the Lonely Planet Guide to Europe on a Shoestring and I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to start traveling frugally is to not buy the book. It gives a lot of information for the countries but is so general as to be almost useless unless you are staying in London or Paris or Rome. Of the things to see outside the cities there a nary a mention. I have particularly enjoyed reading the history sections of each country. I am continually amazed at how little history I really know.
Mike Perzel once said to me:
“The first year of university is congratulating you for actually getting that far. The rest is tearing you down by teaching you how little you know. By the time you graduate, if university has succeeded, they have reduced you to a state of idiocy”
Reading history I do sometimes feel like an idiot, so perhaps my university years were not entirely wasted.
There are too many places and names and dates to remember them all, but it would be nice to remember a few. I once had a professor who likened the study of history to the study of the space-time continuum. Every event could be placed on an x,y,z axis somewhere and then studied as it passed through the fourth dimension, time.
She was, of course, the one professor who made everyone memorize maps and she was despised for it.
But now it seems to me that the study of the events of history, without an understanding of the locations, is completely senseless. Who can understand the achievement of Julius Caesar invading Britain without having crossed the channel?
Who can understand the elephants of Hannibal without having crossed the Alps?
I hope never to understand Hannibal, at least not on the seat of a bike.
Sitting here, the two of us in the tent, is driving me a little stir crazy. Heather has slept for three hours now and my mind is so bored I am counting the squares in the knit of the tent fabric. I could go outside but the weather is so dull and dreary there almost seems to be no point. The only thing to do would be to watch the gray waves crash on the gray shore against the backdrop of the gray sky.
The sound of the waves is so contradictory. At times it can be so soothing, exactly what you what you need to push you over the edge into sleep. At other times it can seem menacing, ready to crash over your tent and wash you out to sea. I can’t imagine sleeping on the beach. All night I would be sitting up just to make sure the waves were in their proper place and not sneaking up on me.
Raindrops too are similarly contradictory. When there is a gentle mist the swish they make against the surface of the tent is one of the most beautiful sounds you can hear. But when you are hit with big fat drops, as we are here beneath the shelter of this cedar, the water hits the tent like a great drum and everything reverberates to the sound. When there is a great heavy rainstorm it is similar to sitting in the percussion section when the rest of the orchestra has gone home. I don’t mind it too often and every once in awhile it can be really exciting, but after listening to it everyday you start to long for some melody.
After a day sitting cooped up in the tent we decided to have a night on the town. We trudged up the main street of Donneville to look for a restaurant. The rain was intermittent; so we brought our raincoats, which would alternately become too hot to wear, then not warm enough. We walked up first one side then the other of the town and found no real restaurants, only bars and a hotel with an enormous statue of a chef with his chest puffed out. We had been mocking the statue every time we passed it, so it didn’t seem right to eat there.
By the time we reached the western end of Donneville Main Street it was beginning to get dark and we had found no food, so reluctantly we descended into Granville. We thought about trying the restaurant at the casino, but one meal there would break our budget for the week.
The casino overlooks the sea and has a pier from which you could lower a boat. In the half darkness of evening the sea looked like a living thing trying to shamble its way up the pier only to meet failure again and again. Further along the pier, where it presented a sheer wall to the sea, the water was battering the concrete with such intensity that great gouts of spray were flying twenty or more feet into the air, soaking those walking by.
Finally we found a little restaurant done up to look like an American dinner in the late fifties. The waitress seemed angry to have to work at such a place in the middle of France. She took our orders brusquely and plunked two half cooked hamburgers on the table with a savage thud that seemed to say “Eat and get out.” Starved as we were we ate, and almost choked when the bill arrived. The hamburgers were what we expected, but the cokes were fifteen dollars each. We paid angrily and left.
Heather felt guilty about not checking drink prices before we ordered, but who expects your drinks to coast more than your meal?
Outside it was now completely night and the rain was falling in the gentle mist that I love. The pavement was shimmering in the half-light of the lamps and everyone still outside hurried to their destinations, collars pulled up high around their faces. We strolled casually back to our campground, pausing to look out at the sea by the casino. It had calmed but looked oily and sinister in the dark, as if some forgotten creature of the depths loomed just beneath the surging waves, waiting for an unsuspecting victim. We were hesitant to turn our backs to it.
The climb back up to Donneville was slow and slippery, but well worth it. When we reached the top we gazed back at the city’s rooftops and the gently light filtering up from the streets in that man-carved labyrinth. It was like looking down on a fairy tale story of what a French city at night should be like.
Sometimes it is hard for us to believe that we are actually in France and not some quarter of Alberta that we had previously left unexplored. Only at the strangest times does it hit us how much rock and earth and water stand between us and home.
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