Hope and Vanessa's European Adventure

Are you sitting down? Monday was a series of small, very stressful and frustrating disasters, but it all ended well due to our new friend at the Paris Clarion.

We got out of the medieval dungeon ok (aka the B&B) for the 20 minute drive to the Aix en Provence rapid train station. We arrived 21/2 hrs later after a scenic drive across the whole f’ing region. During that drive in our manual-stick-shift car, which what was at first nostalgic for these 2 bluebeamer-automatic-transmission-babes, but became a huge pain in the ass when you have postage stamps
to turn around on. Which we did about 3000 times, after we would figure out about every 500m we were going the wrong way. You see, the French must either want to stick it to the tourists or the economic crisis hit them so hard they didn’t have the money to put up the rest of the street or road signs. We also found out that the trusty GPS we were using doesn’t work in the French countryside, or it was in one of its selective moods. We ended up at the train station on time, but oooops, thanks to faulty GPS and lack of road signs, it was the wrong station. Which meant our train was the leaving the station we were supposed to be at, about 45 km away. The agent at the country station was frustrated with us until I said we were Canadian. It really is amazing how the attitude changes when they discover you are not American. He helped us with written instructions from one station to the next, which we also struggled with because of no road signs. You see, they even name their “round a bouts” here, but you never know which one you’re at – and there are a lot of them. Finally we found our ration, a place to gas up the rental and dropped it, threw the keys at the Hertz lady (nicely of course) and ran like hell with about 20 seconds to spare to catch the next train. We made it.

We were about to have a nice, quick 3 hour ride to Paris on the bullet train, until the artist across from us and Vanessa struck up conversation. She was nice enough at first, but quickly turned into Joan of Arc when she found out we worked in oil and gas. Vanessa retreated into her book and you all know me well enough to know how I responded when she asked for my business card, what kind of company it was and when I said oil and gas her response was “oh the bad guys” and that “the oil is from the ground, so it should stay there”…hmmm enter Soap Box Hope… so “so what is that necklace and pendant around your neck made of, oh – metal – comes from the ground -oh – and you are using that to adorn yourself, should that metal not stay in the ground??? I soon softened and became teacher instead of preacher!!!!! Yay Hope. She gave us her number if we wanted to meet up. I told Vanessa if she wanted to meet up with Joan of Arc, she’s on her own. End of disaster #1, it gets better later that night….stay tuned.

Tags: Travel

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