So this is what my French is like. I am standing on the sidewalk by the cheapo apartment hotel where we spent the night with all the normal vacation stuff plus bags of half-eaten groceries because we cooked our dinner last night, while Pat fetches the car from where it was parked for free down the block. A man approaches. I know he is going to say something. He does. “Blah bla blah blahbla bla bla”. It seems agreeable. I agree. “Oui”. He walks on. My brain starts working and a minute later I piece together that he’s said, “So, you’re at the end of your vacation”.
We hop in the car because why walk for twenty minutes when you can use Tom (the TomTom GPS [yes, we are that literal]) to navigate your way to the center of an old city and park right by the door. So we spend the same twenty minutes driving around and around, missing turns and finding weird roadblocks, approaching the cathedral from all directions but not actually getting there. And then bingo, we are on the right track, the cathedral is smack dab in front of us, and we have parked as close as we can. For EUR 2, because that’s the coin Pat has.
The cathedral is big, but not huge. I have seen enough of them that I am not particularly impressed. It is nice. I take pictures. We are done. We get back to the car, and the meter maids are checking. Good thing we paid. I comment that I like France in August because everyone is gone. To the beach, I surmise. In any event, they are not here, and we were not overrun by busloads of anyone.
The whole reason we went to Reims is that the toll road is nice, but boring, so let’s add a night to the trip and drive home through the Ardennes. Good idea.
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