Day Forty-Seven: Via Dolorosa
...Though not quite as well as I could have wished. The bed is one of the Vieux Bordeaux's few deficiencies -- a little thin, and one is uncomfortably aware of certain individual springs. One constantly imperils one's coccyx by plumping down with the expectation that there is twice as much depth to the mattress.
And I am sorry to say that I must look on today's petite dejeuner as a deliberate insult -- one final touch of Bordeaux-ery before I depart, never to darken its doorstep again -- four slices of plain white bread -- NOT baguette bread, but sliced plain Wonder bread -- not toasted, not even warm. This gave me the hardness of heart necessary to disavow any possession of change when paying my bill (I'm actually rattling with 10 franc pieces, but I'll need them for travelling today), and Madame pursed her lips and adjusted her brows, but found the change.
I collected the Kid from her burrow and drove through the morning through weirdly deserted streets -- does everyone sleep in till noon on Thursdays? Shrieked with delight when I found an Arabic language station on the radio, and so it was to the thumping rhythms of Farid el Atraa that I departed the city.
Got to the airport and found the PR lot easily and early. Leaned against the Kid's gleaming argent flanks for the last time, watching the world go by (until the bus opposite revealed itself to be a Team Bus -- of a recently victorious troop of athletes, to judge by the hoots and honks -- and it suddenly behooved me as a single female to become exceedingly circumspect and oblivious of my surroundings.)
The Peugeot operative assigned to pick up my Kid, a pleasant double for the Edge from U2, arrived in good time and accomplished the transfer with speed and good humor (bestowing the proper degree of commendation on the Kid's shining cleanliness -- me recounting the tigerish ferocity with which I defended it). I signed and signed and signed, and within a few seconds, was free to make my way to the taxistand.
Monsieur the taxidriver and I had a pleasant conversation about the beauties of the country (I kept my views on Bordeaux to myself, like a good guest), and he discharged me as close as humanly possible to the TGV gate. And good fortune upon good fortune, the train to Montparnasse was due to depart in ten minutes. Could it have worked out better? I am travelling now -- the seat looks backward, appropriately enough -- the landscape revolves away like a piece of trick photography. I'll be in Paris by early afternoon.
(Later) I'm happy to be alive. And pleased with my rigor in rationing bronchodilators -- I knew I was going to need more than one dose today, and it was so.
Classify under famous last words "Oh, it's only a few blocks to the hotel, you'd look silly taking a cab." Well, you look mighty sillier struggling under a yoke of baggage in the rain, choking and coughing and wheezing and having to drop everything at every corner and bend over to enlist gravity's aid in getting sufficient oxygen into your lungs to continue to support existence. The humidity, the dirty air, the weight of my baggage of albatross and the stress of knowing I was exactly the kind of vulnerable traveler I know better than to be -- a woman alone, overburdened by luggage and visibly tired and distressed -- gave me a perfectly corking asthma attack, which turned those few blocks into a genuine Via Dolorosa. I crawled into the lobby more or less vowing never to leave it again.
I knew already that the Hotel Ibis was going to be one of those clean-but-characterless chain hotels, but it was really quite pleasant, the room in muted blues and gray, with a dormer window almost high enough to qualify as a skylight, whereon the rain patter-pattered all night. And a nice thick bed, a necessity indeed to my shaky old bones.
I repacked my albatrosses to make them balance better, "One heavy thing for you, one heavy thing for you, one light thing for you, one light thing for you..." I tried to go to bed early, having slept not too well the last night in Bordeaux (I conceived an irrational belief that there were rats nibbling in the armoire), but kept getting up to do stupid things like rewrite my list of purchases for Customs. And then there was the thunderstorm -- a fearsome, wonderful thunderstorm, with rain pelting down like an invasion.