Day Four: Flies in the Ointment
Ouf. Can you believe I slept twelve hours last night? I suppose you'll have to, since that's what I'm telling you. With mission accomplished on buying postcards and provisions, I headed on home, having gone around and around and around and AROUND again. Upon mature deliberation, I don't think I ought to travel alone again for this reason -- however much you know you're going to get lost and have budgeted time to get lost and don't get scared of getting lost, at a certain point one gets tired of getting lost.
Another problem is all the math involved in foreign travel. Half of my imbecility springs from needing a great deal of time to figure out 15% of anything, or those damn twenty-four hour clocks...
Anyway. I'm seated on a very cold stone bench in the Jardin de la Fontaine halfway between the Temple of Diana and the Tour Magne. Here I have a little shelter from the very chill wind that goes about seeking whom it may devour today. I tried to make friends with a little black cat quietly stalking about its business, but it had a mind above idle chitchat. I'm parked down by the canal, where a very kind young Sinead O'Connor lookalike gave me her parking ticket, which still had a couple of hours on it. A very civilized custom, this -- someone tried to give me another ticket yesterday, but I'd already bought mine. I purchased a couple of pain au chocolat, a citron tartelette and some orange juice at a boulangerie, and sat down in the little park beside the Fontaine aux Pigeons to eat... Yes indeed, I did feed the pigeons a bit of pain au chocolat, they being bold, comely, robust birds, not the usual bowery losers. Then I walked down the canal, getting chestnut fuzz thrown in my eyes by the wind, and eventually fetched up here. There are plenty of schoolchildren on outings -- I imagine this is about like being taken to the Steinhart for SF children. The Temple of Diana is very pretty, bowered in craggy bits of green and olive, but alas -- they are building a big old apartment complex right behind it.
Having frozen my behind and recovered my wind, I toiled on up Mount Cavalier through sumptuous gardens to the Tour Magne, of which there is not much to say except it is real old, real chunky, and the view is ordinarily spectacular.
And then what do you suppose I did next? Hmmm, that's a poser. What have I been doing every day since I arrived? Get lost, perhaps?
Aidez-moi. J'ai un maladie neurologique que me rend impropre de naviguer.
(AYE-DAY muwah. jay un mal-a-dee near-o-loj-EEK kuh muh ron-DUH eem-PRO-pruh duh nah-vuh-GEAR.)
"Help me. I have a neurological disorder that renders me unfit to navigate."
I am in a state of total, disbelieving fury about how much time, and within how few blocks, I was lost this afternoon. You'd think a grown woman with a) a map and b) an IQ over 140 could get from point A to point B instead of endlessly colliding with the Maison Carree. By the time I got within spitting distance of anywhere, I knew I didn't have enough time on my parking ticket or enough stamina to see anything decently, so I trundled back.