AKA The Sisyphus Quest For a Hotel
After leaving a small country town near Chambord, we made the drive towards Clemont-Ferrand. We had a stop in Bourges, so we explored a gigantic church there.
This church would be the first of many we would visit on this trip. It’s beginning to dawn on me that Catholicism had a huge influence in European history. We decided we wanted to reach Clermont-Ferrand on the same day and we would succeed in that notion, however, not until 11pm would we find a place to stay the night!
Nîmes…we reached the low point of our journey
While Nîmes was a city we did in fact visit, for the purpose of describing this unexpected journey to the hotel–I’ll be quite honest with you. It was likely the part of the trip that was filled with the most despair. My brother Ronan was still sick and we didn’t know if it was COVID-related or not at the time. We were all pretty tired after a miles of walking the city streets, and the food that we ate that night was pretty unbecoming of the standard fare we’d been given thus far. I mean, for example, the “aubergine” burger (French for eggplant, which I hate by the way) tasted slightly worse than the worst American food. And to top it all off, the shower was terribly designed, and it made all my clothes I planned to wear all damp.
There is, however, a silver lining to all of this. After convincing the uptight British hotelier to allow me to use the microwave, I was finally able to make my beloved popcorn royale that I had been carrying in my backpack since in Versailles. We ended the day by watching Shrek, a childhood favorite movie of mine and therefore found it comforting, after a very long and arduous day. The Train was nice though, and it was our first one in Europe
Le saviez-vous? (Did you know?)
Clermont-Ferrand is a pretty cool town. There are eighty volcanos surrounding it. In fact, the Volvic Water company is just north of the city. And there is so much black lava rock, there is an entire cathedral made of it in the center of the town in the gothic style.
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