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Day Forty-Four: I Renounce the Devil & All His On-Ramps

A day full of vexations and pinpricks... But with a more or less happy ending.

I drove off early in the morning, enjoying the freshness of the country up north to Allemans-sur-Dropt, where there is a church with a very whimsical set of frescos: devils wearing grape pickers's baskets full of their harvest of damned folks, St. Michael kebabing a devil while one of the saved runs naked to the Virgin, away from the icky sight. All the devils have the same fire-engine red, curly-horned, cloven-hoofed, mustachioed subtlety of a fireworks package. Very entertaining.

Booked on up to Bergerac after this -- mailed a couple of smaller packages Statesward... My cunning plan was to go into Bordeaux, which wasn't excessively far, and scope out the location of my upcoming accommodations, and head back south through the Landes with a stop at Belin-Beliet, to bend knee reverently at the birthplace of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Then tomorrow I would be more leisured and able to make a nice stop at Montaigne, to pay homage to one of history's great moodlers, as a fitting crown to my sabbatical.

Well. Woman and girl, I have been lost in my day, but NOTHING like the diabolical horror of driving in Bordeaux. It is a nasty, dirty city with a rude, meanspirited populace -- remember, I've lived in Manhattan and can be presumed to be not particularly fastidious on these points. I can't even begin to say how lost I was and how long I was lost. I was lost in the city center, I was lost through several suburbs, I was lost on the left bank of the Garonne and lost on the right side of the Garonne... And there wasn't any possibility of stopping to orient yourself with your miserable little Cadogan maps, because there was not a single open parking space in the whole of Bordeaux.

The voice of reason: "Okay. Just give it up. Tomorrow you'll get a real, complete map of Bordeaux, and you'll sit and study it carefully before you get here, and it will be fine. Let's just get out of here alive and go to Belin-Beliet."

Easier said than done. The Rochade, Bordeaux's peripheque, is the work of the Archfiend. I know the Devil is a real personage and has power in the mortal world, because I have driven on His expressway.

After several hours of trying to get the HELL off the road to Bergerac and head south instead, no one could have been more surprised than myself to be whizzing through piney cool goodness toward Mont de Marsan -- ie, in the right direction -- with a not-unrealistic expectation of getting back to the hotel before dark and the glad tidings that Belin-Beliet is within twenty kilometres.

Two steps forward, one step back. No one need fear that the good burghers of Belin-Beliet are over-commercializing their link to chere Eleanor. I could NOT find the ruins of the castle, though B.B. could be comfortably covered by an oven mitt, and I and a half-dozen other "Ellies" were scouring the environs like bloodhounds. (Add to my store of French motoring knowledge -- the abbreviation "CR" does NOT stand for "crappy road" but "chemin rural," which adds up to about the same thing.) I and a white Renault, hunting in a pack, actually stalked a tour bus -- which went to earth at a public toilet and began disgorging grinning seniors like clowns.

Having spent a good deal of precious daylight on these agreeable and relaxing pursuits, I reluctantly called it quits and got back on the autoroute. And happily arrived just before sunset... And happier still, PACKED for an early departure.

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