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Wanderung 10

Boating around the Boot & Gallivanting through Gaul.

October 2005

Thursday October 20, drive from Nice to Gap, France

Our "Gang of Six" had one final breakfast together in the restaurant right beside the hotel, and then we all went our various ways.

Monika and I took our new umbrella and walked through a light rain to the Mediterranean coast. There we found a long, stony beach along which the city of Nice had built a 5-kilometer promenade. Despite the gray clouds the sea looked blue, and I could almost imagine how deep a blue it would look under a clear, sunny sky. Certainly some day I would like to see Nice in that type of weather.

The big, fancy hotels were right across the street from the beach, of course, and I also saw two casinos. One casino was in an imposing building and reminded me of the casino at Monte Carlo that we visited into in 1973 (at that time, at least, motorcycle leathers were not considered appropriate apparel!). The other casino we saw on the beach appeared from the outside to be a rather tacky, gaudy affair, and it was located right next to an equally garish Mc Donald's fast food joint. I can just imagine the French complaining when that was built, something like, "Sacre Bleu! This neighborhood used to be so Nice!"

But finally it was time to pick up our rental car and start the next phase of our journey. The folks at Europcar provided us with a new Renault Modus, a small 4-door diesel car that had a nice upright seating position and scads of headroom even above my six foot plus frame. The car also had very light power steering, sensitive brakes, a smooth clutch and a nice 5-speed transmission. The diesel engine worked well with my rather low-rpm style of driving because it had a nice high torque curve in the 1,000 to 3,000 rpm range.

All together the car drove and handled well, and it was small enough that I didn't go berserk trying to wheel it around the tangled traffic patterns in old town Nice. Construction had torn up the main street in front of our hotel, you see, and all the side streets were one-way streets, and that plus the almost complete lack of any legible street signs made driving around the town an absolute nightmare. The French penchant for parking (and double parking) right up to the street corners didn't help a bit as that blocked my view down the cross streets. Given those conditions, if you value your life you have to slow down to an absolute crawl at every intersection and carefully creep ahead to see if anyone is coming on the cross street before you can edge out into the intersection. I was also completely flummoxed by who had the right of way at each intersection as most of them lacked any stop or yield signs and I could see nothing else that indicated a right-of-way to one direction or the other. Unlike the Norwegians, who strictly hew to the "car on the right has the right of way" rule, the French seemed to give the right of way to whomever had the most "élan" when arriving at the intersection. Unfortunately, I was still getting used to the new car, so my élan quotient was pretty low and consequently I generally gave way to the other traffic while I sat there trying to figure out what to do next.

Although the car drove like a dream, I did have some problems getting used the control stalks on the steering column. They were loaded up with every possible function but did not work in any way like the cars I drove in the U.S. The functional oddities took some real getting used to and some functions took me a long time to discover. At first we could only get the windshield wiper on the rear hatchback to work, but not the front ones, and that was a Bad Thing in the rain. I kept pushing, pulling, twisting, twirling, raising and lowering different rings and knobs on the stalk whenever we were stopped at stoplights, which was frequently, and I finally figured out how to turn on the front windshield wipers before we got into any really serious rain. But even beyond the controls this car had some peculiarities.

The strangest thing was when the car started spontaneously printing messages to me on the central display panel in French along while flashing some curious yellow warning symbols. One of the symbols, for instance, was a stop sign with a chain connecting it to a car symbol and a kilometer count. I mean, what would you think? It could well have meant, "Prepare to come to a screeching halt in XXX kilometers!" Assuming that it all wasn't just some overblown case of Gallic humor, we finally puzzled out that it was simply telling us the number of kilometers since the trip odometer had been reset (I think!). Another symbol had a car on the left connected by a dotted line to a gas pump symbol on the right. We think that was referring to the estimated range of the car given the diesel fuel available, the current speed, and the current rate of fuel consumption. Mildly interesting information I guess, but rather disquieting when it suddenly pops up in yellow in the middle of your dashboard! I guess I don't deal well with machines that suddenly out of the blue decide to communicate with me. I had a talking camera once that was forever telling me to "use the flash", "insert film" and in general give pertinent but unsolicited photographic comments while I was trying to take a picture. Some folks probably loved it, but it just made me want to chuck the thing in the nearest trash bin.

We stopped at a rest area for lunch and were tempted to visit the automobile museum there, but it closed at 1 p.m. for the afternoon and we would have only had a few minutes to see the collection, so we drove on. The rain started to lift as we turned north at Aix-en-Pence, which I pronounced "aches and pains". The problem with trying to pronounce the French place names correctly was that I was so bad and so inconsistent that our communication became unreliable. Monika had a more consistent French pronunciation, but I just couldn't mentally translate what I heard from her into what string of letters I should be looking for on the street signs. In the end it proved more reliable to use the bastardized English pronunciation of the letters so that we both knew what sequence of letters we were talking about. Do other couples do weird things like that when traveling? It would be rather a relief to know that we are not the only ones resorting to brutalizing a beautiful language!

Soon we entered the foothills and outlying ridges of the Alps. The sky started to clear a bit and the scenery was magnificent all around us. Old castles or monasteries perched on hills guarding the passes in the mountains, and bright villages with their tiled roofs dotted the hillsides above the farms and vineyards. It was almost a picture postcard type of landscape and a very nice drive.

We stopped for the evening at Gap, a pretty town nested in the mountains. After checking in at the Hotel Ibis we walked into the old section of town where we found a graceful cathedral lit by the setting sun. We also wandered along a pedestrian mall that allowed exactly one lane of traffic to slowly go down the middle of the street. To keep the cars in that lane they had lined it with what looked like big cannonballs on each side of the road at close intervals, so any car getting the least bit out of line would get immediately crumpled if not worse. From my point of view as a pedestrian it looked like a charmingly simple and effective solution to the problem of keeping cars and people safely apart on the same street.


 


 

We found a "Monoprix" grocery store right in the middle of the old section and stopped in to purchase the raw materials for our evening meal of meat and cheese sandwiches. We settled on some nice whole grain bread, salami, and sliced cheese plus a bottle of water, a bottle of Coke for me, and a can of beer for Monika. It was getting dark by the time we returned to our room and ate our sandwiches as we watched the BBC world news on TV, after which I updated the journal and Monika read until it was time to retire for the night.

Copyright2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
October 2005
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Epilog

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