Europe 2013: Bonjour, La France

September 10, 2013

Welcome to the second attempt at this update. The first one disappeared when my editor unexpectedly froze. Huzzah.

I didn't sleep particularly well this morning, waking up repeatedly through the night. However, I don't feel particularly tired, even now. Call it a bit of Swiss magic, I guess.

When I got up this morning, the campsite was again absolutely radiant with the rising sun. The mountains surrounding us formed this kind of sumptuous tableau, which was ever-changing, and it was actually quite an effort to convince myself to stop taking pictures and get ready to depart.

I asked at the reception window what it would cost to use the wifi, and was informed it was free, and handed the password. Wish I'd asked that last night, but ah well. I sent off a trip report I had ready, and checked my email, which was the important part. I'd sent a message to Nicola, with whom I'll be staying next, in Paris, and wanted to see if she'd responded. No luck, but we'll be talking soon, one way or another!

It was with a certain amount of regret that I once again rolled up a damp rain fly into its bag. It hadn't rained the night before (Swiss magic wouldn't have allowed that, and the sky was full of glimmering stars when I'd gone to bed), but dew had formed on the outside, and there was condensation on the inside. The condensation is the killer, since the fly is actually water-repellent on the outside, but merely impervious to water on the inside. It doesn't go through, but it also doesn't bead up on the inside surface. This makes it a right pain to get rid of, since shaking it just gets the big drops, but leaves a lot of water clinging to it. Normally, I would leave it out in the sun, but it was going to be an hour or two before the sun would rise over the trees to actually hit the ground near me. So, I packed it while still wet, knowing I would be able to unpack it and air it out tonight.

I rode off, snapping a few more pictures of the mountains (they'd changed already! new light! new clouds!), including about three stops in the first five minutes to get this amazing rolling-wave of clouds along a ridge. Pretty much as soon as I was further west than the campsite, the signs were suddenly in French, much as they had suddenly been in Italian before Oberalppass. I realized that the campsite would be the last signs I'd see in German for this trip.

The experience of speaking German was fairly pivotal to this trip, for me. I'd planned three different German-speaking countries (four, if you count Liechtenstein) as destinations. I set up my cell phone number in Germany. For weeks before the flight, I would listen to a stream of a Hamburg news station to get the sound back in my ear (and coincidentally get about two-thirds of the German perspective on world news; the other third being all the words I didn't understand).

In the same way, the sensory experience of Switzerland was pivotal to the trip. I'd imagined rolling through a countryside very much like Switzerland, with tall mountains and pastoral valley scenes rolling out in front of me; with gorgeous, centuries-old houses climbing the hillsides, and fields full of cows and sheep. I'd actually imagined a bit more snow on the peaks, but we can't have everything. The point is that Switzerland, up until this point, had been like the embodiment of inexperienced dreams. It was another dreamscape come to life, but unlike Glenuig, I'd never been there before. I'd just imagined it, and then found that it was real.

So it was with a sense of disappointment that I rolled away from the campsite, and toward the broad valleys of Sion, and the crowded, built-up shorelines of Montreux and Lausanne. They were still cool, sure, but they weren't the close, mountainous valleys. And the language had changed: now it was French.

I have a rocky relationship with French. One of my favorite books, _The Enormous Room_, by ee cummings, is full of French, most of which (through repetitious reading and context) I think I understand. I took two years of French in high school, of which I've retained an infinitesimal amount. I can read the important bits on the road signs, and have spent enough time in Canada to know what different foods are called. But that's pretty much it.

My ability to generate phrases or sentences in French is miserable. If I practice in my head well in advance, I can come up with an acceptable phrase (this is how I deal with asking for the restroom in gas stations, for instance), but if I have to say something on the spot and spontaneously, I'm doomed. The vocabulary I can remember at the best of times is only a few hundred words, and when put on the spot, it drops down to the mid teens.

France also did its level best to ensure I didn't feel too welcome. I was riding around the north shore of Lac Leman toward Geneva when I decided I wasn't much enjoying myself, and I should hit the fast-forward button and get to my campsite for the night. I'd picked a place more or less at random near Dijon, figuring that would be a good distance to ride the next day to get to Paris.

So, I set the GPS to send me towards my campsite, and it delivered up quite an enjoyable minor mountain pass road, and I passed through the border at La Cure (Robert Smith was not in evidence). I actually forgot that I'd wanted to take a picture with the "Welcome to France" sign as I passed it, and decided against circling around so as to avoid exciting the interest of the Swiss border agents.

The temperature on the lakeshore had been mild and pleasant, in the low 20s, or mid 70s Fahrenheit. As I climbed the pass road to La Cure, the temperature dropped (I saw a sign on the French side of the border that said 12 C, or low 50s). On the lakeshore, the sky was a pleasant combination of cumulonimbus clouds and blue. By the time I was in La Cure, the sky was a uniform, ominous dark grey, and the streets were wet.

I was only three minutes past the French border when the sky opened up and it rained. Then it rained harder. Then I felt hail mixed in with the rain, stinging me through the suit. All this with the temperature in the high 40s and low 50s, and me dressed comfortably for mid 70s. I was cold, and I was rapidly getting soaked through, and I was miserable. The Swiss magic had abandoned me at the border, and France was welcoming me.

My entrance into France was thus not among my happiest memories of the trip. I should have known something like this would happen -- Juerg had told me that the weather moves from west to east, so it makes sense that the French Alps, like the Olympics near Seattle, perform the service of squeegeeing all the water out of the clouds before they hit Switzerland. Of course it was raining when I descended the west side of the French Alps. All this logic didn't make me feel any more welcome, though.

Fortunately, the rain didn't last too long, and by the time I'd reached the plain below, which took about half an hour, the rain had stopped and the sun was out again. Feeling a bit more welcome, I followed the GPS's weird path through tiny French agricultural access roads, stopping occasionally to take pictures of the absolutely spectacular cloudscape opening out all around me. The advantage of flat ground is that you can see the sky forever, which makes it a more interesting trade-off than it would first appear when compared to the amazing landscape of the Alps.

Eventually I found my way to my campground, where the proprietress was volubly disappointed in my driver's license as a form of ID. It was lacking something, but I didn't have a clue what she was talking about. I should have asked her if she spoke German, since she insisted she spoke no English, but occasionally dropped a German word if she thought I didn't understand something.

I now have Germans set up on either side of me, and English caravan campers across the little road. I suppose, in that sense, I'm well catered for should I have a desire of some conversation in a language I can speak with any facility.

I have left the land of staggering mountainous beauty (and, oddly, a huge profusion of aerial wires -- I had a devil of a time getting some of the shots I did, for all the wires cluttering up the skyline) and entered the more gentle landscape of plainlands France. In one sense, the trip seems past its peak, but I hope that seeing Nicola again for the first time in 17 years will prove that, rather than being past its peak, the trip has merely moved onto a different kind of peak altogether.

Tomorrow, Paris!

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Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.