Vacation with Darrell, part 1

photos later - my computer is having problems with Blogspot

The inadequacy of writing implements
Darn. I’ve lost my fountain pen. Misplaced it. It can’t be lost. I just haven’t looked for it in the right place yet.
The usual places I’ve looked. Like the pocket of my shoulder bag and the fountainpenbox next to the dining table. (There are times I wished I spoke German for real. They have so much fun with their words, the way they just run all the adjectives together into gigantic nouns.) Even the pockets of my backpack, and the other backpack. Not there. I must have put it somewhere strange. Or left it out and the cats have put it under the couch with all their other toys.
So I bought this replacement pen, a rollerball that is supposed to have an extra-fine point. For the unctuous flow of liquid ink plus the superfine control of a ballpoint for lots of characters per inch.
Yeah right.
Trust me, the handwritten version is much less pretty than Times New Roman.
It’s a good thing there’s a bic in my purse always for working diabolic sudokus while waiting for the bus. Not so beautiful, but I can’t stand having to write in huge loopy gestures. Makes my handwriting degenerate, and we don’t want that.
On board the 17:25 to Paris I’m all set: journal, choice of pens, water, snackage, knitting. Extra yarn.
Heading up to Paris tonight may not be strictly necessary, but when it comes to meeting my brother at the airport relatively early in the day, I’d rather be safe than sorry. The train people have been having too many problems lately and with me not having a cell phone I’d rather just buy peace of mind with my hotel room.
After all, I haven’t forgotten the summer of ’95.
That’s the year I was in New Haven and decided to take a road trip summer vacation swinging through upstate New York to see Marie, through Boston dropping her off with friends, then up to Maine for a few days B&B on the coast. Darrell was in school in Indianapolis at the time and was to meet me in Boston for the Maine part of the trip.
I get to Marie’s and we mess around on most every small highway we cross, stopping at myriad yarn shops and antique malls. It’s a wonder we make it from Ithaca to Boston in less than a week, let alone in just 2 days.
After spending the night with friends, I go to Logan airport in time to meet the flight from Indianapolis. No Darrell. Next flight, no Darrell. Other airlines, no Darrell. He’s not on anybody’s list. He’s nowhere.
So I call him, and his colleagues say ‘oh yeah, he’s on vacation with his sister’.
Yep.
I go round and round in circles at the airport. I have him paged. Many times. No response.
It starts to get late, and the reservation in Maine is not refundable. I call up there, but they have no messages for me. It’ll take hours to drive there. Eventually, I decide to leave messages everywhere - with Marie, the airline, the b&b, his lab, everybody, and start to head north, checking in with people every hour or so.
Finally, I catch someone in Indy who knows Darrell better.
“He left a couple of days ago.”
???
A couple of days ago??
Suddenly I turn pale and get all lightheaded. I had in fact said he could meet me today, just in time to head for Maine, or he could join us in Boston on Monday, if he could stand Marie and her crowd that long, and see the city with us. Only, I could have sworn he took the Wednesday option. Really.
When I get to Bar Harbor, Darrell himself is on the line.
Yeah, he thought we’d arranged to meet on Monday. He waited for me at the airport for hours. He called Marie’s but we had gone. He called me, but I don’t even remember the code to pick up my messages from afar. Not that I thought I had reason to. So he got a room in a hostel, saw a bit of Boston on his own, and caught a bus home.
Shit. I stood him up. Invited my brother on vacation and then didn’t show.
ARRRRR!
I bet he hasn’t forgotten either.

Paris
It is a awful lot of messing around. From pulling into Gare de Lyon on time just before 9, it takes me until 10 to get to the airport with barely a car on the highway. So I figure, if I had taken the 6am train, arriving at the station at just the same time D’s plane was touching down, by the time I actually got to the terminal in daytime traffic he’d be panicking. Or I would. His plane would be taken off the arrivals board and I’d never find him.
Such are the useless calculations that go round and round in my brain.
Other examples:
What if the hotel has lost my reservation, which has happened to me more than once, and they’re full? That would just be annoying. It’s not as if there’s an off-season shortage of hotel space at CDG airport.
But - what about Natalie? She got out this morning and now she’ll be out until tomorrow night. Another red herring. Natalie is a great hunter, and barring a mouse or bird she can live off her fat for one day.
But - what about the other cats? I forgot to sift the catlitter this morning. Sigh. They’ll live. Sienne and Bandersnatch are fairly tolerant and I promise to do it First Thing on getting home.
But - what if we’re delayed getting home and the cats have to go the whole week...?
Stop cogitating and go to sleep.

In the morning: Hooray! I have no email from Darrell. No news is good news.
Miscellaneous meanwhile: Marie has reached the critical mass of people inviting her to join Facebook. She’s in.

Darrell’s flight is early and the airport is right there. Very convenient. There’s not even any traffic getting back to Paris and the Gare de Lyon. Near the station we sit in a café for coffee while D catches me up on the news from the States.
Number one, Dad had bypass surgery about a month ago.
What!
Nobody told me anything!
Well, telling you now. He’s been home for a couple of weeks. Doing fine, though it isn’t an easy recovery. At first he was admonished not to lift more than 10 pounds. And he really didn’t want to. Only, the cat weighs 13.
!!!
And there’s stuff happening with our brother. Events going on all over the place, and nobody says anything. Various topics certainly give us something to go around and around on over lunch and on the train.

Clermont and south of there
We spend Wednesday picking up the rental car and stocking up on catmaintenanceitems and in general just messing around, getting over the jetlag. Out in the garden we hack at the fruit trees since it’s that season, and then we visit with Jerome to pick up Maurice and Laars. Relations are established with the cats: Natalie comes right over for petting, Sienne meows and is wary but eventually submits to a few caresses, Bandersnatch hides in the bedroom.
Thursday morning it’s time to hit the road. We’re headed for the Perigord region, to see the cliff dwellings above the Dordogne river and to eat the regional specialties of duck and truffles.
Sticking to the smaller highways we get to Ussel at midday, so we stop for crepes (potato and bacon, followed by chocolate) and cider (one hard, one soft) and a walk around. Then through Tulle and Brive-le-Gaillard and on to Montignac for the tour of Lascaux II. It’s good to tour the cave at this time of year: instead of 40 people crammed into the reproduced cave, there are only 12 in our group, so we’re not tripping over people all the time, or trying to get so somebody’s head isn’t blocking your view only to have some other one fill the gap. And at 56°F it isn’t any colder down there than outside (something to plan ahead for for a summer visit!).
Unfortunately, our tour guide doesn’t know how to be quiet. She just repeats herself when she’s gone through her speech, never letting us admire to our own thoughts, filling every minute with remarks on the obvious. She tries to repeat herself in faux-English for the few non-French guests, but forgets herself and lapses into French. That’s ok. Seeing the cave paintings is the main point of being here, and we can do that regardless of the soundtrack.
An hour distant we stop at Sarlat-le-Canéda for the night. Sarlat has a beautifully restored mideval center, a grand tourist destination (grand? I’d never heard of it before) with a vast number of touristy restaurants and little shops selling foie gras and truffles and walnut oil and poultry-themed knicknacks, and art galleries, and antique shops.
It’s practically deserted as we wander about after a refreshing shower and change of clothes, looking for a likely dining spot on this chilly November evening. We come across several good photo-ops we vow to come back to in daylight. The old city, though artfully lit, is too dark for night photography without a tripod. Darrell has been ready for dinner since the event was mentioned, but for me it’s early still. So I make us wander around until 7:30.
We settle on a touristy restaurant that seems to have all the right choices on the menu without being too expensive. For really extraordinary dining here in foie gras & truffle territory you can quickly get beyond my budget, and we’d need to be better dressed anyway. It’s good food where we land. We’re not disappointed.
In the morning we take a walk around, seeing the sights and taking pictures. The covered market is advertised to open at 8:30, but an hour later they’re barely getting ready. Not that there’s much of anyone to get ready for; they’re not exactly selling to the locals. All they seem to have is the same stuff that’s in the gourmet shop windows - 1001 forms of duck and goose, truffle this and that, walnuts in various incarnations. No point in us going in.
Then it’s off to follow the Dordogne. We arrive at La Roque-Gageac. Time to walk around, and it soon becomes obvious that this is where a lot of the cliff-dwelling pictures advertising the region are taken. Just fell right on it. There’s a stairway attached to the cliff-face leading to some of the really old caves, which seems promising. Alas, to get there you have to go through somebody’s house, and it’s closed, possibly for the season. So we just take a good look from below and then wander up and down the elongated village.
There’s a pretty little castle where a stream comes to join the Dordogne, making a narrow valley heading north. This too is somebody’s house now, closed to visitors. In fact, everything is pretty much closed in La Roque. The antique shop, the hotel, the restaurant, the bar, the tourist office. Most of the boats that cruise this part of the river are out of the water, even.
Up the road, Castelnaud is a very impressive castle built up on the top of the cliff where a major tributary joins the Dordogne. Beautifully restored and accessible (in low gear), it’s open from 2 to 5 pm. Ah. Well. It looks like an excellent visit, with the castle yard full of siege engines and all. It’s 11 now. We’ll come back after lunch.
We head for a neighboring castle marked on our tourist map, Milandes. It’s closed too, but until April. Forget it.
Let’s go to Saint Cyprien; there seems to be stuff to see around there. Yes, only we get turned around and drive at random in territory south of the river when we should be north of it. In these hills you can’t see very far at all, or you can see a great distance but the road doesn’t take you there.At long last we get to St. Cyprien, another very nice little town, this one built around a large, strikingly plain church. After a good walk around to get our circulation going again, we score a wonderful lunch. Truffles, we want to have truffles of some kind before leaving the area, and of the three restaurants open one has truffles. Darrell has duck with truffle-madiera sauce, while I have a nice rare steak with truffle-butter. Garlic fried potatos on the side, and a few leaves of lettuce. Mmmmm.

Saint Germain des Fossés

There’s nothing quite like taking a day off just for the pleasure of it. It’s not like a Saturday, filled with chores and the weekly shopping, or Sunday, which is a lazy day because all the shops are closed. And anyway, most other people have those days off too.
On a Friday it’s more savory, more like cutting class. What’s the fun in a day if idleness is enforced ?
I sleep deliciously late. Later even than I’d wanted to. When I see 8 :40 on my clock I think- no ! my day is running away from me and I’m not even up to enjoy it. Then a leisurely breakfast of thick coffee with cream and french pastry at my favorite bakery and it’s off to see what trains are leaving for Saint Germain des Fossés.
The train to Paris is at the quay, leaving in five minutes. Will I be able to get my ticket before it leaves ? I fight the machine – the line at the ticket window is six people deep - and get a reservation. But there are endless questions and pauses and it takes its sweet time considering my ATM card and printing the tickets. Finally it spits everything out and I rush to leap onto the train as the stationmaster is readying to blow his whistle.
We head out over the Plaine de Limagne towards Vichy. The sky is mostly cloudy, but not dark or terribly serious. It’s a jumble of heavy clouds and smaller white ones and slanting rain in patches, sun in others. Crows hop and pick in the empty fields. Stands of january trees show their nests and their balls of mistletoe.
The train pauses in Vichy to take on passengers and let some go. Just as we’re pulling out of the station, at less than walking speed still, a young man bursts out of the station and looks at the train in bewilderment. He has missed it. His knee-length coat flaps as he raises his arms and lets them fall, not yet thinking of what to do, just of seeing his ride leave, sliding along its smooth rails without any thought for him.
And here we are, forty minutes from Clermont, at St. Germain. It’s a small town on the Allier river, which has been partially diverted to a sinuous canal that wends its way through the older part of town. The canal skirts a small hill, dominated by a large, plain church that surveys the small shops and rows of houses like a master.
If there’s a focal point to St Germain, it’s the church, though I’ve been attracted here mostly by the sight of the canal cut through the medieval construction. The church has been completely redone in the mid-20th century, and as I come up to it I can see the horror of the shell-pink scallop of the main entrance. Oh my. Not only is it a poor choice of paint, but it’s badly applied as well. The façade is austere, with none of the saintly statuary typical of older churches. It’s quite ugly.
Inside, I am very pleasantly surprised. The windows are a true work of art. Done in a style reminiscent of Art Deco, they are mostly in blues and greens, with red and yellow for effective emphasis. Each three-part window has a central story full of characters, flanked by colorful geometric panels.
Road noise filters in from outside, joining the intermittent sounds of a saw and a drill, and occassional hammering. One of the secret rooms behind the chapel of the Virgin is being worked on. Another room is bare but for a chair piled with tools and materials. From the sounds, I take it there is but a single carpenter.
Outside again I wander down the road a bit and discover that I’m just in time to see the market pack up. It isn’t yet noon, but I guess in a small town when people have done their shopping for the day, they’ve done it. So the handful of vendors are occupied with loading up their trucks and vans with unsold lettuce and beets and onions and going home. Empty cartons and flats are strewn about, and random greenery – outside leaves of cabbages and lettuce, carrot tops, stuff they cut off for you.
Pretty soon the road I’ve chosen comes to a dead end at a sort of factory building. Lampshades a Specialty. It’s unclear if the place is still in use. There doesn’t seem to be anyone much around, but there’s a light visible through the frosted glass panels of the fancy doors, and lots of fresh tire tracks make their way around to the back. There’s a sense of near-abandonment about the place, though, in the peeling paint and chipped plaster, the empty car-park, the dark windows of the wings. Curious.
I backtrack and take a road that quickly leaves the town and goes through just a few short suburb streets where the houses are larger and the yards taken up with lawns in front and gardens and children’s toys around the sides. Soon there are fields of corn stubble or sheep.
The field of sheep seems to have two. It’s a good-sized field, maybe five acres of grass going down the slope to be lost among the brambles along the Allier. It has barbed wire here along the road and separating it from the old corn, and a shed and a water trough in a downhill corner. The shed, an affair about twenty feet long with a corrugated tin roof and three weathered plank sides, is filled with stuff. Actually, it’s filled with sheep. It’s crammed with sheep. Sheep look piled up on each other ; they’re spilling out onto the ground around the water trough.
So. The two sheep in the field are splitters ? What are they doing off on their own ? They’ve seen me now, and they’re coming over. This one wants a headscratch. I scratch its hairy white head, and now the other wants some too.
I take their picture. Strange sheep.
Bells are ringing in the distance, compelling me to think of lunch. Those people at the market this morning bought all they needed to make lunch at home. I think back on the town and can’t remember a single restaurant. There was one advertised near the train station, but I didn’t actually see it. Hmm. It seems short-sighted of me now to not have tucked an orange and a bar of chocolate into my bag before leaving. Or I could have bought a snack at one of the small groceries that will all be closed now. I hadn’t thought that St Germain was so small as to not have a restaurant. There was a bar. There might be sandwiches there.
Looping back toward the center of town by a different route I have no better luck at spotting lunch, but then it occurs to me that I didn’t see the entire high street on my first pass. I detoured to see the canal. Perhaps on those two skipped blocks there is some small brassierie, a pizzeria.
There are two eateries on the main street. One appears to be a bar that serves a one-item menu for lunch and dinner. Today they’ve got blanquette de lotte, take it or leave it. This is a species of white fish served up in chunks under a thick, bland white sauce. Bleh. With a side of cauliflower gratiné (echh !) and a green salad.
No.
The other place is a bar as well, and I hope there is a dining room in the back because the front is small and filled with smoke from a dozen cigarettes. At least there are people here. I consider - better to eat with smoke, or not at all ?
The menu is unusual, including alongside the usual pizzas, salads and cuts of steak, the choice of bangers and mash, or oriental chicken, and a steak might be served with cajun sauce. Inside there is indeed a dining room, around the back, reserved for non smokers. I am the only one there, for the moment. It’s nice. The sounds from the bar filter their way back, but not the smoke. A large window gives onto the front yard of a house and a garage.
My hostess is English. She’s happy to speak her native language for a change, but, like me, keeps lapsing into french for typical phrases. Her husband runs the kitchen and his name is Dean. Product of the 60’s she says – James Dean, Dean Martin.
She’s sad when I ask if they have any dark beer. Alas, no. The french won’t drink it. She’d like to stock something but there’s really not enough of a market here in a 11/2- restaurant town. So I have ordinary french beer and an excellent salad and a plate of fries and chocolate pastry dessert.
When I take my leave of Frederique and Dean it’s not quite raining out. It’s wet air, but not real rain. I’d like to get around to a good view of the north side of the church, where there seem to be some ruins along the steep part of the ridge. Shops around here are named Bar of the Ramparts and such, so there is hope for a hidden medieval secret St Germain. I do find a tower that’s been incorporated into a house, and the air has got a bit drier, but aside from a crumbling pile of stones in the churchyard, there’s not much visible of ancient St Germain. You’d have to go into the houses and the cellars to find it.
In the plain to the north of the town there are farms toward the river and suburban-like residences closer to the railway. The few orchards look too old and untended to still be active, but that might just be the effect of winter.
In one grove of apples, with a dozen or so trees, the largest tree, the one centered in front as if representing his orchard, marshalling his minions behind, is still covered in apples. Well, not really covered, but not more than half-picked. All the other trees are bare.
The apples on this tree are small and red, and a few look inviting enough to pick and eat. Most have seen better days and have rot splotches. Some are just limp skins, their flesh eaten by birds, or wrinkled balloons eaten out by insects. The ground around the tree is littered with windfalls – they look bright and shiny among the wet grass and accumulated leaves. Some are firm underfoot, others squish like mud.
I come to where the Allier has been released from its concrete channel. Here it’s just a ditch lined with half-dead trees and garbage. Farther down where the stream joins the main river there will be wide sandy banks and pebbly shoals and willow thickets full of birds, but that’s too far to walk today.
Turning upstream I follow the canal through town. None of the mills that were the raison d’être for the canal still exist, but it does make for a nice, different, path to follow. Halfway along it leaves the road and becomes the boundary for two rows of backyards. It’s surprisingly short. In fact, you can see all of it from the train.
Swinging back toward the station I come upon an SNCF (train company) training ground. They’ve got engines and cars of various types parked, and a freight engine is going pointlessly back and forth, but that’s all usual for a train yard. The extra is a yard full of bits of track, switching mechanisms, wire-strewn towers and level-crossing signals. Just bits that don’t go anywhere. I mess around there for a while but there’s also a series of official SNCF buildings with their lights on, and train guys messing around on the real tracks, and I don’t want to get yelled at.
It’s three-twenty and I’ve seen about everything. I’d like to pick up a postcard or two if I can, so I head back to the main street. At the newsagents, among the many that postcards that deal in puppies, or flowers, or puppies and flowers there are three that are actually of St Germain. Two aerial views and a poorly-chosen picture of the smaller church. I take the less ugly of the landscapes (who is their photographer – get a new one !) and sit in a bar with a miniscule glass of kir to write to friends. It’s raining in earnest now, so I decide to take an early train home.
The lightness of the sky has gone. A somber grey blanket has moved in, as predicted, to give us rain, and later snow in the lower mountains. That might mean tomorrow I can hike up the hill a ways and play in the snow. Today it means that the time for exploring is over.

Now we'll see

Yea!
It's hard to discern what impact this or that president has on the practical facts of an individual person's life; so much more depends on yourself and those immediately around you. Certainly these Bush years have cast a certain uneasiness and embarrassment over me. I find myself too ready to apologize for or distance myself from my country's leader.
So it is with a refreshing sense of lightness that I come to work today, to continue the work of yesterday as I would have regardless of who will inhabit the White House in January. But there's a bit of happiness in the air, and it isn't just me. There's an anticipation that things can come around now; that being an American is a good thing, for me and for everyone. Maybe now we can change for the better, stop making enemies, get people moving toward getting along.
There's a lot of hope with Obama.
Nobody knows how that hope will be transformed into facts on the ground, but I think there's a willingness to try, and to experiment, that bodes well. So don't just sit back with your arms crossed over your chest, thinking, 'alright, now prove it'. Pitch in. Be part of the answer.

The world sees America as many things, but the most positive is as an ideal. Many have been wondering where that ideal had gone. All over the radio this morning, it seems that ideal is back. The French, at least, are thrilled.

That should be it for the political posts. The older ones I already deleted, and we'll get back to travel very soon. I've been working on a thing about trains - perhaps I'll complete it once my Oncogenetics class is finished at the end of the week.

Ciao!

Take this quiz

Hmmm.... what to watch, what to watch...
It's a knitting night as I try to make progress on my latest project, and that means: there must be something on tv.

So what is there...

Channel 1: American election coverage extravaganza!
Channel 2: Coverage of those crazy Americans and their election!
Channel 3: Gonzo Comic American election coverage!
Channel 4: American election coverage featuring People You're Really Tired Of!
Channel 5: American election coverage as Seen from the Perspective of a German Broadcaster!
Channel 6: Two new episodes of Desperate Housewives, no commercial breaks.
Channel 7: The Electoral College for Dummies!


Guess which program will be airing at my house tonight, and you could win a jar of my very own homemade blackberry jam. Or equivalent if it has to be sent to the States. Take your pick now! I don't have that much jam, so one winner will be chosen at random from the correct answers.

Justice? Right?

One of the other blogs I follow is written by Ruth, a young American woman living in Syria studying Arabic. Her post concerning the American bombing of an agricultural area near Damascus last week is something I hope you will read: http://inthemiddleoftheeast.blogspot.com/
Did any of you even hear of this incident?