Stevenson & France

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Robert Louis Stevenson

21st May 1999 1300hrs Sunny again! Friday. Paris. Last night was great – very chatty evening, good food, good wine, good beer. Good, really. We only had a few strolls around Nanterre (where Herve’s flat is) ‘cos of the rain. We’re off to Tours today, at 5:15 from Gare d’Austerlitz. We’re gonna pop the keys back to Olivier later. Au revoir to Paris, listening to Air: Moon Safari, Herve’s flat....ONWARDS! Ha-ha. The open road beckons...

With the train out of Paris so late in the day, there was no need to rush. We leisurely tidied Herve’s flat and strolled from the metro station to Olivier’s flat to return the keys. On the excruciatingly slow metro journey across Paris from Montmartre to the large southern train station we realised we were running late.

We missed the train. The one after it was two hours later, and took an hour longer, meaning that we’d arrive in Tours, our destination for the day, at about nine o’clock in the evening, well after most normal people have already sorted out where they’re going to stay.

Getting onto the train and wedging our backpacks into the overhead luggage space for the first time was deeply exciting. This was the first leg of a journey on rails that would take us around Europe and back again in the course of the coming weeks, and we were hyperactive with. We read the guide books voraciously, stared with intense pleasure at speeding scenery which was not all that dissimilar to the British countryside but we just didn’t care, wrote postcards home, and ate our food still in the atmosphere of excitement. Then it stopped, and the scenery going past the window darkened and faded to black. We started consulting the guidebook in earnest, weighing up our options. Had we caught the earlier train we would have been in good time to choose; to catch the bus to the campsite 5 kilometres south of the town, to the hostel 5 kilometres south of the town...the options were there for us to choose from. Standing at the bus stop outside Gare de Tours, we realised all the buses had stopped for the night, and all the fun was happening, for some reason, 5 kilometres south of the town.

The Hotel Vendôme was some way down the list in the guidebook, which normally seemed to run on a cheapest-places-first basis. We called ahead, and they had rooms free, the first place on the lists to say so, and so we trundled around the train station to the address, down a wide dark boulevard with sycamore leaves waving above us in the streetlight.

It was pitch black by the time we arrived and the hotel was in a terraced row of tall narrow town houses and the door opened as we climbed the rounded stone steps. A balding moustachioed man with a huge grin reached out to help with our packs, which we had to take off in order to get through the door. He started laughing at my hat, which so far on the trip was not an unusual reaction, but then he started prancing around doing impressions of flamenco dancing.

“Vous ete un mexicain? Oui oui?”

You couldn’t help but laugh with him, and then his smile got bigger. His wife, a large dark-haired woman in a floral print dress, came out into the marble-floored hallway and rolled her eyes at him, but she smiled underneath. They were the perfect antidote to hours of nervously wondering where we were going to sleep, and they ushered us up the staircase into a poky little room, most of which was taken up by a double bed and a wardrobe big enough to contain any magical kingdom you care to mention and still leave plenty of room for clothes. There was a tiny window set high in one of the walls, which we could just see out of if you stood on the bed. There was a bit of roof, the side of a tree, and blackness. It might have been a better view in the day, but the bed made ominous creaks and sagged hugely when we stood on it, so we didn’t chance it again. It was a wonderful place.

We ate a bit of the baguette and Brie we’d bought for lunch earlier, and fell asleep on the sagging and slightly crumby bed (- top to tail this time, removing 50% of the potential for an awkward morning).

Money shouldn’t really have started overshadowing things yet, but I was aware that Gemma had a more comfortable sum to travel on than I did, so I got a bit anal about it. The hotel worked out, once again, to be cheaper than a hostel, and was only 140FF, or about £14, for the pair of us. I resolved to be careful, but not to start worrying about money so much that I didn’t enjoy being where we were...