The long journey home

For some reason, I am completely inept at travel. Don’t get me wrong, I like it – actually, I love it – and want to carry on doing it for as long as possible. But the smallest things throw me into an existential fit of terror. Take this morning, for example. All I had to do was return a car hire to a place near to Montélimar station (in fact, it was literally opposite it). This, you will recall, is the place at which I had a bit of a stand-up fight with the office clerk last time. I had a train at 11:15 to Valence, so had decided to leave at 9-9:30 to give me plenty of time to find the secret parking spot (like in the Harry Potter films, it is never in the same place at various times), return the keys, have another stand-up fight with the office clerk (I had originally toyed with arriving at 11:58 to see what he said), reclaim my 1200 Euros deposit, and make the train with probably 20 seconds to spare. Montélimar is about 30 minutes’ drive from Le Poët-Laval, so I figured I could just about make it.

As it happened, I woke up at 5:30, realizing I hadn’t told the clerk I was going to drop off the car early. There might be some hidden clause in the contract that meant the could refuse to serve me until the originally appointed hour, so I had visions of sitting there in the office overnight while he said things like “vous avez signé le contrat” and “je ne peux pas vous prendre, monsieur”, all the while looking at me like I was a piece of dessicated dog turd walked in by another customer. So, I emailed at 5:31. Anyway, at least that gave me the opportunity to repack for the 30th time. After a quick cup of tea and big thank you to S., I headed out at 8:58. You never know when you will need two-and-a-quarter hours to drive 25km.

Guess what? Everything went smoothly. I arrived at the car hire place without the slightest problem, found the magic parking spot, and – miracle of miracles – was even met outside in the parking lot by a young, friendly and smiling young woman, who said she had received my email and thought she would wait outside in case I was in a big rush. Ten minutes later, I was in the station café drinking a grand crème and eating a croissant. Rentacar France – never go anywhere else.

Arrived in Valence Ville to find P waiting for me. PP in fact. Now I have extolled the virtues of the French railway system enough—with perhaps the exception of the odd TER—but it is a strange anachronism that the TGV from Montélimar that goes through Valence doesn’t stop at the Gare TGV specifically built for that purpose (one might suspect), but rather at the Gare SNCF. I don’t know about you, but having a TGV not stopping at the TGV station is like having a heavy goods lorry that doesn’t overtake you in the slow lane at 140 km/h or finding a member of the Conservative Party that tells the truth: it’s rather unexpected. So, I had had to make a couple of scrambled WhatsApp messages to PP to let him know where I would be and he had, thankfully, received them and managed an equally scrambled U turn on a busy road to get to me on time. The things I put my friends through.

Home to Châteauneuf-sur-Isère find his son B waiting there, and then a lovely spicy chicken casserole lunch with mandatory wine and digestifs. Sat the afternoon listening to music and catching up. Before I knew it, it was dinner time and B had gone to fetch his girlfriend Lola from work and we were all sitting around eating and drinking again. All in all, a lovely way to start the concluding leg of the Ottawacker European Tour 2024.