360 Degrees Longitude (7 page)

Folks in those quaint English villages (towns?) would look at us oddly as we passed through on our bikes; the French, in contrast, would roll down their car windows, and give us a huge thumbs-up and shouts of encouragement. Of course, for all I knew, they could have been swearing at us for slowing down traffic, but I didn't think so.

By the time we got to the heart of Caen, it was the peak of the afternoon and very hot. We'd been following hot and smoky buses through traffic that was jack rabbit fast sometimes and turtle slow at others, only to find ourselves gazing at half-completed apartment buildings where the Caen campground had once been.

“It's time to splurge,” September declared. “Let's find a hostel.”

France being the way it is, by the time we were settled in our hostel all of the stores were closed. Dinner became leftovers from lunch, and breakfast held all the promise of the vending machines in the lobby. But the hostel held a reward.

Unless you have been cycling all day, it is hard to understand the lure of a nice shower. Long before we got to Caen we began rating campgrounds solely by the quality of this three-minute experience. There is the drippy shower, more of a leaky faucet than a proper shower. There is also the one-size-fits-all shower, which has a non adjustable water temperature. Last, but not least, is the dreaded timed shower, operating off a token whose timing is unpredictable. These three types can be combined, but the nadir shower experience is the insult-to-injury shower: a combination of all three where you get to pay for a token, and get no water pressure or heat in return, only to have what water flow there is cut off while you have shampoo in your hair.

Our hostel in Caen had showers in which we could actually adjust the temperature to whatever we liked. Is that a novel concept, or what? To top it off, we could let the water run as long as we wanted. To clinch the experience, the hostel had chairs
right there in our room
. Sheer decadence.

• • •

I thought the French were all beside themselves with disgust at the thought of a theme park with mouse ears. As we entered Festyland we saw that its theme was William the Conqueror and the events of the year 1066!

“What's with the Viking war ships and weapons?” I asked September. “I thought the French were pacifists.”

“And I thought the theme of the park was the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Last time I checked, there weren't any Vikings there.”

The gears in my brain jammed at that comment; I would need to consult Wikipedia to drink from the fountain of knowledge.

Later that night at an Internet café I learned there
is
a Viking connection with the year 1066. My spin on it is that Festyland was purposely built by the French to torment the English. One of the most brutal chapters in English history came to a close on September 25, 1066, when a king of one of the many disparate fiefdoms in England defeated the occupying Vikings once and for all at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Exactly nineteen days later was the Battle of Hastings when William the Conqueror (who was French, remember) defeated the English and became what modern Britons call their first king.

So, just about the time the picnics were winding down in celebration of the end of centuries of tyranny and Viking oppression, the French showed up and one of them declared himself king. A thousand years later, they still haven't left. Festyland, with its half-Viking, half-William the Conqueror theme, is France's way of reminding the world that the British have had only nineteen days of sovereignty in the last millennium.

 

John's Journal, June 29

Jordan and Katrina have become the very best of friends. They were close before we left, but now that they have no one else they have become very tight
.

Anyway, the old saying is that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I guess that applies to relationships, too. All this togetherness could tear us apart, but so far, it hasn't. That can only be a good thing, right?

Speaking of family togetherness, one of the problems with all this quality time is that there are no opportunities to get away from each other. This was, of course, known beforehand. But it becomes more “personal” when there really isn't an opportunity for two consenting adults, to, well, consent. Before we embarked on this endeavor, September and I talked about this very problem, and didn't come up with a satisfying solution. We hoped something, or some opportunity, would present itself. It hasn't. The best idea we have come up with so far is to send the kids to the shower to get ready for bed and then quickly move the tent before they get back. We haven't resorted to that
—
yet. But it is starting to look like our best option
.

Most people go to Paris to see the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower, or to people watch at trendy streetside cafes. We were off to Paris to pick up our mail; the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower were mere perks.

In the months prior to leaving California, using our general route as a guide, September researched the places we were going to visit and had amassed a mound of books about two feet high and three feet in diameter. These books were age-appropriate reading material about the places we were to visit, and formed part of the kids' homeschool plan. September's mother agreed to send us a package of books and fresh math homework every month so long as we supplied an address. We took care of the first shipment ourselves. The day before we left California, we had placed our first installment into the U.S. mail bound for Paris and now we were going to pick it up.

Katrina and Jordan had already polished off all the books we had brought with us, as well as an extra infusion we had picked up in the U.K. September, tired of the preteen genre, bought a copy of
The Da Vinci Code
, and then placed it in
my
front right pannier.

We had been advised that Versailles was a better base than Paris proper, as it was easier to approach and maneuver by bicycle. We planned to stay in Versailles to be tourists for a few days, leaving our bikes locked up at the campground and traveling into Paris using the Metro.

We settled into a five-star campground near the Palais de Versailles that soon enough would be seared into our memory as the Campground of Shame: the worst of the worst and the one by which to judge all others.

The morning following our arrival we made preparations to go into Paris. September returned to our tent from the shower. “How was it?” I asked.

“Awful. It's the insult-to-injury type. And in a five-star campground, no less.” The Campground of Shame still had more to offer, but we wouldn't discover that until later. With no real agenda except to spend the day in Paris, we soon found ourselves sitting on a bench along the Champs-Elysées.

In our party of four we were rarely more than an arm's length from another and the kids wanted to be part of everything. As a consequence, no conversation was too trivial or too private to interrupt. We ate our lunch (yet another ham sandwich!) and watched a mind-boggling number of people rush past us. “Six billion is a really big number,” I muttered to myself more than to anyone else. It seemed a planet's worth of people was pushing past us at that very moment.

“What!?” the children demanded. “What are you guys talking about!?” It was as though the fate of the world hinged on every syllable we spoke; everything became a four-way conversation. We did find a solution for about an hour when we got to the Eiffel Tower.

“Race you to the top!”

I gave it my all for about two flights of stairs, then happily abandoned the lead to Katrina and Jordan. We paid about thirty dollars for the privilege of climbing halfway up the Eiffel Tower, only to find that it cost another thirty dollars to complete the journey by elevator to the top. In the interest of sticking to our budget we sent Katrina and Jordan into a hopelessly long queue to wait to go up to the top by themselves. They felt very grown up, and we were free to enjoy a conversation without its being punctuated by “Huh? What did you say?” If only they'd had a room for rent on the first deck.

• • •

When we'd first arrived at the Campground of Shame, we had the place virtually to ourselves. We set up our tent and had a nice chat with a father-daughter pair from Oklahoma who were cycling roughly the same route we were.

However, the population of the campground exploded while we were in the city. “It looks,” I said, casting my eyes about, “as though the six billion people we saw along the Champs-Elysées followed us …”

“… here.” September had noticed the same thing I had and completed my sentence. Everyone was under the age of twenty-five and sporting a ring or stud on the odd body part. “There must be some sort of festival or something.”

It was the
or something
. Live 8, a rock concert devoted to raising awareness of the upcoming G8 meeting, was scheduled at locations around the world with people gathering planetwide for music and demonstrations. One of those places just happened to be at the Palais de Versailles, within shouting distance of our tent.

It's not that I don't like The Cure, but I don't like them rattling my fillings loose at 2:00 a.m.

• • •

“Okay guys, today we're going to visit two important places. One is the Louvre, probably the most famous art museum in the world.” There was a collective groan from my audience of two. I needed to work on my intro.

“The second place is the Palais de Versailles, where …”

“Hey, Dad!” Jordan cut me off. “Isn't that the place where the queen with the big hair used to get mad at the men because they would pee in a corner because there weren't enough places to go to the bathroom?”

“Yes, Jordan. Marie Antoinette.” Jordan was clearly retaining what he was reading in his
Horrible Histories
books. Seeing where men would pee in the corner of the palace in defiance to the queen was worthy of a visit in a kid's eyes.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at Versailles we found it had recently closed for renovation, so we made our way to the Louvre.

The Louvre happens to be free of charge one day a month and we happened to arrive on the very day. We stood in line with all 6 billion people who had been following us around Paris, inching past François Mitterrand's now (in)famous glass pyramid that doesn't have 666 glass tiles. It has 673, but that just doesn't elicit the proper emotion for the conspiracy theorists, so the urban myth endures. But counting them gave us something to keep our mind off of the searing sun until we finally crossed the threshold into the Louvre and blessed climate control.

“Okay, we could spend a week here and just scratch the surface, so we need to prioritize,” September advised, “or else we run the risk of attention spans expiring before we see what we came here to see.”

I gave September a blank stare. “So, like, what did we come here to see?” It isn't as if I'm a great patron of the arts. I knew that the
Mona Lisa
was lurking about, but that was all. “I are an engineer. I don't know nothing about art,” I said, summing up the situation succinctly.

September smiled and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “It
is your
short attention span that we need to be careful that we don't exceed,
not
the kids'.” With that we made it our mission to see the
Mona Lisa
, which took another forty-five minutes. Half the population of Japan was queuing to have their picture taken in front of the famous painting. We hopped into the queue and another forty-five minutes later we had our few milliseconds next to it.

“So, why is that painting so famous?” Katrina asked.

“That's why we have Google and Wikipedia. Between the two of them they know everything.”

“I thought you said
you
knew everything,” Katrina said coyly.

“Well, I had to tell someone in case I forgot some detail, such as why the
Mona Lisa
is famous. See how it works? By the way, isn't it time to be going?”

September cast one of her looks in my direction that let me know I was about to be given a lecture in art appreciation. “You know,” she said, “the French make fun of Americans for this very reason.”

I feigned stupidity. “Because we look up stuff on Google?”

“Non!
We just got here. The French accuse Americans of being monosyllabic mouth breathers because they rush into the Louvre, see the
Mona Lisa
, then scurry away. By leaving now you are proving them right.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I'm okay with that. They make fun of us for our two-week vacations, too. But I know if I go to my corner Super Wal-Mart at 3:00 a.m. to buy the Brady Bunch-size pack of Twinkies, that Wal-Mart will be
open
. And if I stop in to use the facilities, hey, I don't have to worry that I left my personal bar of soap at home.” I gave my dear wife the most heartfelt smile I could muster, batting my eyelashes for added effect.

Standing in line for the
Mona Lisa
followed by all this rumination had generated basic needs. September made a dash to use the facilities. She came out of the restroom with big news.