Farewell France

Well it was my last day in France. I'm going to miss being able to talk to the locals. Even though my French isn't perfect and after a sentence, they know I'm an english speaker, it sure helps being able to understand people quickly and to talk reasonably well. I definitely need to come back and spend some serious time here.

The day started fine. I woke up in the disgusting hostel and had breakfast. I wasn't rushed because I found out about an english bookshop in Avignon that opened at 9:30 and I wanted to buy some books because I'm going through them too early. Also, I wanted to buy that bottle of wine I tasted earlier in the week from Croziers Hermitage. That shop opened at 10. So, at 9:30, I was at the bookshop. It was a quaint little place run by an old English gnome. All sorts of used books that have been collected for a while. I found two books and made my way to the wine shop.

The wine shop wasn't opened at 10, so I waited around for a few minutes and the owner eventually showed up to open the place. This was the shop where you could pay by the taste and try a bunch of different wines. I talked to the owner about the shop and apparently it's quite new. They just celebrated their first anniversary and definitely cater to the tourist crowd seeing as how they're right on the Place D'Horloge. They had a guestbook and he was saying that they counted it recently and have had people from 21 different countries come into the shop from Tawain to Australia to South Africa to Canada. I added my name.

Next stop was the train station. I had to return the bike to Lunel and the plan was to take the train there and drop it off. Unfortunately, I missed the train by 10 minutes (I never did check the schedule) and would have to wait until 1:30 for the next train that would allow bikes. So, I had some time to burn. I went to the post office to ship all my bike gear back home. I wanted to make room for wine and goodies in my pack, and I didn't need the bike gear. Unfortunately it wasn't cheap. I tried sending it the cheapest possible, but it's still going to get to Pittsburgh by Nov 10 and cost me 40 euros. I suspect there's some cheaper way that's not through the post office, but I definitely wasn't going to figure that one out.

Lunch was a tomato and goat cheese crepe, but they ran out of goat cheese so it got supplemented with some slightly stinky cow cheese. Delicious. And for desert, I went to the patisserie and bought some macarooons. Real french macaroons, which are basically two merengue cookies sandwiching some cream. They were damn good.

Finally, it was time to catch the train. I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to put my bike, so I put it in a car that had some open space if you fold up all the chairs. It was designed for wheelchairs. It worked, but I found out when I got off that one of the other cars actually had hooks to hang the bikes from. Go figure.

Dropping off the bike wasn't to eventful. They seem pretty impressed by how far I went and in particular how mountainous the terrain was. I was kind of surprised because I know that shop caters to avid cyclists. They advertise tours for things like climbing Mount Ventoux. Incidentally, Mount Ventoux woudn't have been possible on this trip even if I wanted to do it. Apparently it's a 6km, really tough climb and I think the mountain is 1600m high. It's what you'd expect considering it's the famous one from the Tour de France. However, this week it received it's first snow of the year. Not easy on a bike.

After dropping off the bike, I took the train to Montpellier and went to my hotel. The hostel was booked full, so the cheapest I could find that was close to the train station was a 15min walk and turned out to be a pretty facy place. It was 50 euros for the night, but I had my own little apartment complete with kitchenette and itty bitty dish washer. The dish washer was the size of a drawer. It was kind of hilarious actually. Unfortunately, I didn't really get to take advantage of it because I wanted my last dinner in france to be a little fancier and my train in the morning left at 7:30am. Also, I would have written this last night except that when plugging in my phone, I somehow tripped the circuit breaker and it was late enough that I lost power for the entire night. Good thing I brought a headlamp :-) I hope my phone charger and laptop charger still work, otherwise I'll have problems.

Before dinner, I went exploring Montpellier. It's actually a lot more modern than I thought on my first time through. My first time through, I was staying in the old part of town, but this time, walking around a little more, I was impressed by how americanized it was. There'a huge shopping mall right off the main boulevard and looks exactly like ones in the states unfortunately. I even saw some American chains like Clair's accessories. That made me laugh. Also, looking closer at the sandwich shops, I realized there's a sandwich "Formule Americaine". It's a baguette and inside is steack (yes, spelled that way) and french fries. That's not American! It's Yinzer! But somehow, it's over here and because it's the cheapest thing on the menu, quite popular with the young folks. Arrggg.

I had dinner at a busy cafe/restaurant. I didn't notice that the restaurant was upstairs, so I ended up sitting in the bar area and it took me forever to figure out that I had to ask for a restaurant menu to get some food. Eventually, I got a tasty, wafer thin crust pizza with chicken, emmantal, olives, garlic and oregano. Worked for me.