Day 30-33, October 20th-22nd, 2005

Cherbourg to Carcassonne, France

We got to the train station easily following the signs, though it felt a bit weird to be on the right side of the road again, but that was the end of the easiness. I went in to find out about buying our tickets, and I found that none of the agents spoke much English, which I found a bit surprising, but that was just the start. What I found out at the counter is that you can’t get from Cherbourg to Paris on a train with a bike. You just can’t, impossible, no can do. You can get to Caens, about half way, but once there, sorry, not Paris. The ticket agents kept saying this like it was supposed to help us, I guess they figured once we were there it would be someone else’s problem how we got the rest of the way. I went back outside and we spent the next while trying to piece together routes that would get us to where we were going. We could take a bus to Granville where we could take a train with our bikes, but not until the next day, and we wouldn’t get into Paris until 9 at night when we would have to ride our bikes between train stations in the dark. We could take the bus Avergny, get on a train to Rennes, get on another train to Nantes, spend the night, and get on a train the next day to Toulouse, and hope that there was a bus, or local train that would take bikes from Toulouse to Carcassonne, where we eventually needed to go. It was crazy, but it was what it was, so we decided to spend the night in Cherbourg and try to get the bus in the morning and deal with the crazy connections. While sitting at the station we ran into the French biker who was on the ferry, he was taking a train at 4 and we rode to the grocery store together and than he very graciously rode to the hostel with us to show us where it was. There weren’t open until 6 so we locked our bikes and went walking around Cherbourg.

            It was a pretty neat little city. It has a quiet network of pedestrian streets which is very peaceful. We treated ourselves to Crepes and nutella, heavenly, got a cup of coffee, not as good as I was hoping for, but worlds better than Ireland, walked around some more, got some Pain au Chocolat (chocolate croissants) also heavenly, then headed back to the hostel. Our room was really nice, we almost wished we were staying longer just to stay in the hostel. But we were getting up quite early to catch the bus at 6:15am, so we made dinner and went to bed.

            The next morning, we slowly got ourselves up, it was very dark, and threatening rain, so we donned our gear and headed out. Of course, just when we got on our bikes, threatening turned into actual rain and it was coming down steadily by the time we got to the bus station. We were early, so we sat on our bikes waiting for the bus…waiting…and waiting…maybe it was just late…waiting…it was half an hour after it was supposed to be there and we were just getting up to go over to the train station for a plan B when a bus arrived. Unfortunately, it wasn’t our bus, but we managed to communicate enough to the bus driver for him to point out to us that our bus only ran on Mondays, it was Thursday, but there was a bus that went there via another route at 11:15. We thanked him and headed over to the train station to wait because we could go inside where it was dry and a little warmer.

            We sat in the train station trying not to think about the three more hours of sleep and the included breakfast we could have gotten at the hostel, and munched instead on the apple sauce and cereal bars the woman at the hostel had been nice enough to give us, we took turns sleeping a little, and waited for morning to break. Which took a very long time, it stayed pitch dark out much longer than seemed necessary.

            When the bus station opened I went over to see about the bus we could take and it turned out that yes we could get there, but it was a bus to Coutances, and then a different bus to Granville, with not much time to spare before we would have to get our train. The whole travel scene was turning out to be very discouraging. On a whim we decided to see how much it would cost to rent a car. It turned out that it would be cheaper for us to rent a car, than take the myriad of trains and buses to get to our final destination. We found that quite disappointing that we were in Europe, and it was both simpler and cheaper to rent a car, than take public transportation with our bikes. But it was, so we did. We rented a funny little part truck part car looking thing, managed to get all our stuff into it with a bit of creative arranging and just a little dismantling of our bikes, and hit the road. It was fun to be driving, and we got to see some nice countryside. We stopped in Rennes for some sustenance, and headed onwards. We also drove through Bordeaux, which seemed to be a very nice city, but we couldn’t find the hostel, so we decided to push on all the way to Carcasonne.

            We arrived in Carcasonne at about 12:30, we were beat and ready for a bed, we had called the hostel and knew they were open, but we had a bit of a time finding it. We drove around for awhile, hoping to see signs, I had looked at it on the map awhile back and it was right in the city, so we thought we would find it. We were driving through the skinny streets of the city center, not finding anything. Carcasonne, we now know, is made up of two parts, the new city, and the medieval city, the most intact medieval city in Europe incidentally. We just assumed we were driving through the old city because the streets were so small and it seemed old to us. After we finally stopped and asked someone at a bar that spoke English, we discovered we hadn’t been in the old city, so we drove a little further on and looked up to see a walled city and castle, earily lit up in the fog, and realized, ah, that medieval walled city. It was a very odd experience to have at 1:30 in the morning running on our second day of bad or not enough sleep, but we parked and walked by towers, across a draw bridge, and up a truly narrow cobble stone street and found the hostel. We were in a bit of culture shock needless to say. But we made it, and crawled into very welcome beds.

            The next day we managed to get up, returned the car, and called Sarah, our first WWOOFing host (World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). We made arrangements to meet and set off on our bikes towards the village of Montreal, supposedly not far from Carcasonne. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, we were riding in t-shirts, it was warm, the hills were green, the vineyards were just starting to turn colors, and we nearly died on our ride. Probably a combination of elevation, heat, and three nights of poor sleep, but it felt unreasonably hard. But we finally made it, and discovered that we weren’t there yet, Domaine du Les Jasses, the name of the property we are staying, is at the top of a hill overlooking the village of Montreal, 7 km away. Luckily Sarah took our bags, we rode up the hill, and made it, barely, to the large house where we would be for the next two weeks.