It's NASCAR! Well, not quite, but probably more interesting.
Talk about arranging a balloon ride a couple towns away evaporates when the day dawns drippy and overcast.
We head out of Bouilland about 8am and plug up through semi-rainy weather into Nuits-St. Georges, and try to find an ATM that will give us cash. We try three, none will. It's midnight back home and apparently something's down for maintenance. Oh well.
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| Gevrey-Chambertin at 0930. |
We poke on up the backroad route du vin through Gevrey-Chambertin and Chamboeuf for a little sightseeing; it's 9:30AM and there's absolutely no one around. We stay on the side roads around and into Dijon from the west and tank up at a Total station (there goes another $70), and a few wrong turns later eventually find the route north.
Observation: town after little town, each with their Town of a united Europe sign at the town border - and their Mort pour la patrie 1914-1918 monuments on the town square.
After a peaceful couple of hours of touring we stop at Langres for a rest. This is a fascinating place - the town has grown and continues to build on the ruins of the old city walls. One corner of the wall, in fact, hosts a big campground in a pretty spectacular location. We detour down into town and end up spending a couple hours just wandering around. I find a Tex-Mex restaurant(!) but Eva wasn't willing so we went to a market store, bought the customary collection of baguette, ham, tomato, drinks, and mustard, hiked back to the wall, found a convenient bench, pulled out the pocket knife and made sandwiches. Some local bees took exception to our location, and we had to shift to another bench to finish in peace.
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| Langres | |
We rolled on through St. Mihiel - another of those names from the history books that means both more and less once you see the place. It's a fair-sized crossroads, with typical tiny streets and a local church being extensively rebuilt. The French and Swiss, at least, seem willing to spend pretty much whatever it takes to keep small towns from dying off.
We got into Verdun a little before dark. We had no hotel reservation here, so we decided to try that most French of all travel experiences - the Formule 1. Alas, they're full.
We regroup with a vanilla shake at McDonalds, and head back to a motel near the roundabout leading into town. The price is more than Formule 1 but still pretty cheap; everything works but the bed is low and very, very hard. The window is a smallish square thing high on the wall - this is apparently some sort of standard design among the cheaper French hotels/motels. Why?
Verdun is a busy commercial town, the battlefields being just far enough from town that they don't cast too heavy a shadow over the place. We had - yes, again, pizza for dinner. Pizza seems to be pretty much the European Union Unifood, which to be honest suits me well enough.
After dinner we head back down the road to St. Mihiel and on to the US WWI monument, through a bunch of pretty little towns that survived 1870 only to be bled white half a century later. Mort pour la patrie. We got to the monument a little before sundown - it's impressively sited and worth seeing. A note to one side mentions that the place was shot up in 1944, being rebuilt in 1948. Town of a united Europe - let us pray.
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We slept reasonably well despite the bed. One ends up suspecting that in some dialects of French 'mattress' translates as 'plywood' and 'pillow' as 'Duraflame'.