The Trip of a Lifetime: June 24 to 26, 2022 - La Rochelle

June 24, 2022: Captain’s log: star-date 68; Friday, La Rochelle, France
We took a cab to the bus station this morning. This is the second time this happened to me in Spain; I said, “¿Habla Inglais?” And they hung up on me. I called back and used my pigeon Spanish to try to order a cab and they said, in Spanish, they couldn’t do it. Do they learn this stuff at cab dispatcher school? It’s like Danny Devito on steroids.
This time I had a savior: a lifeline; Javier, our Air BnB host. I woke him up, and in our mixture of languages, he understood what we needed and go us the cab.
The bus ride was a hoot. We had a student driver with a coach for the first third of the trip. He stalled the bus (it was a stick) in a tunnel, but for the most part drove really well. I couldn’t do it. He went into little garages and up narrow streets, with cars parked too far from the curb. I would have made that bus look like the car in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
The real driver spoke Spanish, French and English. In Spain he did the announcements in Spanish and English. In France, he did them in French and English. When he drove he talked on the phone 75% of the time. Our first stop was in San Sebastián, a place we drove to for as day on our honeymoon. Fond memories.
We crossed the frontier easily: no showing passports or COVID-19 cards. They just waved the bus through. In Spain you have to wear a mask on the bus. In France you don’t have to. How refreshing! We stopped in Biarritz, Where Roz and I actually spent most of our honeymoon. We went past the Biarritz airport, which is famous in Clark family history. It was the first place that Roz ran away from home to.
The bus we got on in Bilbao was headed to Nanne, which I believe is Nantes in French. We were at the Biarritz Bus Stop. An English lady approached the trainee driver, who only spoke Spanish, and asked where the bus is going. He said, “Nan-tes,” She said, “Greenwich?” He said, “No. Na-tes.” She said, “That’s what I said, Greenwich! How could this bus be going to Greenwich?” He went looking for the trainer driver and when they both returned, the lady had stormed off someplace else. Can’t make this stuff up.
Speaking of awkward language encounters, I am back to stumbling in French, instead of stumbling in Spanish. I switched over to studying Pimsleur French while we were riding.
We stopped in Bordeaux. There was mayhem; people running from green bus to green bus as they came in. It’s all about getting to the station with minimal time and hopping on your bus at the last second. It’s like mass transit in general and Blixbus in particular want you to be confused. In Morocco it was better. Better organized. Also, it was adults on the bus - here it’s kids backpacking.
It’s a small sample size of a few places in one day, but things seem really expensive here. We had fried chicken from a fast food place, had a drink at the Curious Bar and then turned in.
jusqu'à demain

June 25, 2022: Captain’s log: star-date 69; Saturday, La Rochelle, France
My jogging has fallen to the wayside. You can’t order dinner here (or in Spain) until at least 8:00 PM. Then you go to bed late. And I don’t want to wake Roz when the alarm goes off at 6:00, so I keep it off. By the time I wake up there are too many people in the streets.
Plus, we’ve been in mountainous places since the Blue City in Morocco. But now we are on flat land again. When we get to Paris, hopefully I can get back in the swing of things. We are getting plenty of exercise, but I get grumpy when I don’t go jogging.
It’s hard to get breakfast here too. Places that say they serve breakfast sometimes don’t. And we have often sat down to eat, been told they aren’t making food, so we ordered coffee or something, and then someone else sits down and food shows up at their table.
An easy fix is to eat sandwiches, which we already did to some extent. The bread here is wonderful. Sandwich shops are always selling food. We grab our beverages at Carrefour and go back to our place. Restaurant food is getting more expensive as this trip progresses, so it is helping with our budget too.
We went to the local aquarium today. They have a great selection of fish; the best I ever remember seeing at an aquarium. There is also an exhibit about what happens when you go underwater.
It is interactive and covers changing colors, changing light, microorganisms clouding the water, pressure, etc. It is really well done and has it’s purpose, if it motivates people to really take the plongee.
Then we visited the Musee du Nouveaux Munde. I expected a bunch of futuristic virtue signaling b*llshit. It wasn’t like that at all. It was about France in the Americas. There was an extensive part about slavery. It had things aboutHaitian independence.
There was a room dedicated to us. It had the Declaration of Independence in French. There was some stuff on Benjamin Franklin, who was quite a party animal while he was here.
The rest of the day we had crepes, Roz made a lady cry - but in a good way - we found the train station we need to get to early in the morning, we had a some dim sum and packed. Life is good!
jusqu'à demain

June 26, 2022: No captain’s log