The French, or rather Europeans in general, live their lives with a sense of pleasure and joie de vivre that the average American lacks. The typical American family fastidiously plots their departure for vacation like the VonTrapp family plots their escape from Austria in The Sound of Music. The French, on the other hand, have a more hedonistic approach. A travel day for them is regarded with blithe anticipation and is filled with stops in the country to enjoy meals en famille and sojourns at landmarks along the way. In August of 2010, my family decided to take on the European method of travel as we journeyed from Paris to the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France. The “road rip” was preceded by a sleep undisturbed by alarm clocks, followed by a leisurely breakfast, and finally one last scenic stroll through city. There was neither a wake-up call meant to galvanize us at the ungodly hours of the morning nor a brown-bagged breakfast or bagel on the go. The car ride itself was not nearly as pleasant.
The scenery of the French countryside was so ravishing that not even the works of Claude Monet in the Louvre could have depicted it properly. Unfortunately, our rental car, a four-door Peugeot, was about two sizes too small for our eight pieces of modest-sized luggage. To make matters more unbearable, the backseat was damp and smelled of must; this was an indication of someone having left the windows of the car open in the rain and the rental company neglecting to clean it. Despite the car’s shortcomings, the trip was to be made as enjoyable as possible, and therefore the hotel bid us au revoir with a parting gift of fluffy, crème brulée-colored towels. I took the front seat for the following six hours while my mom dozed in the back. My dad and I laughed at our French GPS as she mispronounced English words like “intersection”. By nine o’clock at night, our walled destination was in sight. As our compact car rolled through the front entrance, we were presented with ironically, an intersection. A scrawny, tanned man in a striped shirt sat lazily where the two roads met; we believe he was meant to be the night guard. In a mixture of French and English, we communicated that we were headed to the Hôtel de la Cité. Teetering on his leather shoes, the man insisted that we could follow either road to arrive at our destination and eventually directed us to bear left. About five minutes in, the road turned into a dirt path too narrow to turn around in. Out the right window, the ancient wall surrounding the city was close enough to touch. To the left was a staggering cliff, gravel and stones chipping off as our car eased its way forward. Eventually we reached a fork in the road, however one leg was a set of stairs and the other a steep, blocked path. A group of men and women casually walked out of the walls and down the stairs, only to find themselves face-to-face with the frightened Americans attempting to back up. With the directing of the laughing French, who praised us, “Now you can drive anywhere in France,” we managed to turn the car around and made our way back to the intersection where we then turned right.
While we had triumphantly entered the city’s walls, the journey was not over yet. Navigating the walled-city proved to be a challenge as well. All the roads were extremely narrow, making near collisions a common feat. Sooner or later, two cars meet headlight-to-headlight and someone needs to take the initiative to back up. When this situation arose, it was eleven o’clock, and we were not turning around. The stubborn man in front of us seemed to have the same idea, for when my dad shook his head, signifying that we would not be going anywhere but forward, he shrugged his shoulders and lit a cigarette. Like a knight in shining armor, the hotel concierge arrived to our rescue, flashing the two golden keys on his suit collar like la police flash their authoritative badges. We finally relaxed as he escorted us through Carcassonne’s maze of ancient stonewalls and breathed sighs of relief with the comforting knowledge that from that moment on, the vacation had begun.
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