One of Those Days

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Wednesday 21st May

Marion went to collect the car from the underground car park she had left it in the last couple of nights to find it effectively "parked in". With Owen's aid in alerting her to the distance between her car and the others, she inched the car back a few millimetres, shoved the steering wheel around to opposite lock, inched the car forward a few millimetres, shoved the steering wheel around to opposite lock... You get the idea.

The first section of the drive from Carcassonne took us back to where the road from the North that had taken us from Millau met this one. We resisted the urge to head North and re-acquaint ourselves with the bridge and instead continued on the road travelling East. At first this new area was all scrubby trees, almost no houses, a treeless wilderness. Then the same scenery re-asserted itself, apricot houses with terracotta rooves and vineyards.

Along the way we noticed long lines of cars queued up for petrol which was a little worrying.

The scenery continued as before except there were also fields with green crops and a number of fallow fields that were covered in a carpet of red poppies. In addition we occasionally caught brief flashes of pale blue out far to the right as the Mediterranean Sea (or rather a couple of its bays) became visible for a moment or two. The houses also began to change a little, both the "terracotta style" and the style we had seen further North seemed equally popular. There was also the occasional distant chateau which sometimes appeared to be a ruin.


Our problems developed further when we got close to Nimes as Navman directed us to a road that clearly wasn't the one the hotel was in. The directions and map that the hotel owner had sent us and which we had printed off was no help at all. Although we thought we were on the correct road, we were unable to find the building listed in the instructions after which we were supposed to take the next turn . We had purchased the best map of France we could find earlier in the trip, but it was of a rather large scale and also no help at all.

Much scratching of heads and consulting later we concluded that the hotel was not exactly in Nimes, but in a "satellite" city just developing to its south called Nimes Quest. (Well we certainly had a quest!)

We decided to go back and try the hotel's directions again. On the way we came to a massive queue of cars at a petrol station on a side road. Clearly something was going on. Perhaps a petrol strike!

Fearing the worst we joined the queue and slowly got closer to the pumps. After an hour we finally got to the bowser. It was a fully automated station, no attendant, and you paid by placing your credit card in the slot before pumping any petrol. We had used our credit cards all over Europe, restaurants, shops (especially games, jewellery, glass and mask shops), toll booths, hotels, you name it. One of Marion's acted up occasionally, the magnetic strip was no longer quite as strongly magnetised as it should've been, but this pump spat out every one of the six or seven cards we tried. Result, no petrol, but an hour wasted.

Even more importantly, we still hadn't located our lodging for the night. We headed back to the A4 motorway which was were the hotel's instructions began. The first part began "Leave the A4 at the Nimes Quest exit...". Rejoining the A4 we almost immediately came to a toll station. As Marion extracted the card, I noticed that the side of the box said "Nimes Quest" so we were leaving the area were we should've been. So we went less than a k down the road before performing a large loop (with the aid of Navman) to return to the paying side of the toll booth.

You pay by how far you've travelled. The guy puts in the card into a machine, it calculates how far you have gone on the motorway and displays the payment required. Well we had entered at Nimes Quest, and were now leaving via Nimes Quest so the machine showed zero. A conversation ensued in broken Frenglish, on both sides, as the attendant tried to work out what was going on. He, literally, scratched his head a number of times, eventually gave a very French shrug of the shoulders, ripped up the card, raised the boom gate and waved us on, still looking extremely perplexed.

We left at the Nimes Quest exit, as the directions instructed, and again failed to find the building we were supposed to locate as a landmark telling us when to turn.

We pulled over and had another group rethink. We had noticed a petrol line snaking down the other side of the road we were on so we U-turned and lined up at the end of it. Owen was set out to do a recky and check whether the station had an attendant, and, presuming it did, whether the attendant could direct us to the hotel.

Owen came back smiling; there was an attendant and she had drawn a map of how to get to the hotel. It was quite a curious document but at least we had a new set of instructions. The wait for petrol was only about half an hour this time, as they had multiple pumps, and we continued our "quest". We were able to follow the strange map successfully and arrived at the hotel.

Marion was fuming but managed to keep a civil tongue in her head while communicating that the directions to find the hotel were total drivel. Once the car was unpacked, we decided we needed to do something about lunch; it being about 2.30 by now.

Marion located a fairly swanky restaurant in an info flyer we found in our hotel room.

"Yes", said the nice man on the other end of the phone, "we are still serving meals."

"We will be there in half an hour", said Marion.

With apologies to any Nimeians reading this, Nimes is a hole.

My roots are in the western suburbs of Melbourne: Ascot Vale, Moonee Ponds, etc. Well the western suburbs of Melbourne are palatial compared to Nimes. Everything is grey, drab, run-down, graffitied and dirty. The streets were littered with dog turds and sundry other refuse. It is a very depressing and uninviting town. If you are ever in this area of France, avoid it.

It took us a little longer than half an hour to find the cafe as we got a little lost. Our map of Nimes had one cathedral marked as a tourist attraction and we had parked in the cathedral carpark. We made the logical assumption that this was the cathedral under which we had parked. Wrong. There are two other cathedrals in Nimes and we had parked under one of them which is why the landmarks made no sense.

Eventually we got ourselves located (with the help of a local retailer) and headed off to Mum's restaurant with the nice man. We presented ourselves and were told flat out that they weren't serving any more meals...nice man!

Fortunately we found another eatery that was interested in our custom. It was next to the landmarked cathedral; so we had a look in there. It was an old cathedral but was cold and did nothing for any of us; but it did have the most hideously decorated gut-wrenching chapel of all time.

Wandering back we decided we may as well poke our nose into the newer cathedral (completed around mid 1800's). It also did nothing for us.

Still reeling from the vision of La Cathedrale's shrine, we presented our card at the machine which tells you how much you need to pay, which promptly spat the card back out at us. Two more tries, same result. We knew the drill from here having had the same problem in Clermont-Ferrand, you press the red button. This time the chap on the speaker at the other end of the red knob comprehended enough English that we could explain our problem.

He instructed us to come down to his office. Owen went in and came out at a rate of knots. It became obvious why when we entered. The room positively reeked of stale cigarette smoke, (Owen is allergic to tobacco smoke which can trigger asthma attacks) and the air was so stale that I was surprised that there was enough oxygen in the room to sustain one human being, let alone three. By managing to hold our breath we eventually obtained a card that would allow us to exit the car park.

Thinking the difficult part was over, we headed out of the car park into Neims. Picking the correct lane to leave the second roundabout in the direction we wished we almost ran into a bollard blocking our route. The only direction we could travel in was down a very narrow road which we eventually found was blocked by a second bollard. Only open road this time was another narrow road which was blocked by bollard number three. This left us the option of the narrowest road yet. We inched into it just making the corner and proceeded carefully along it. At the end was the main road we had started in, but our only option was to travel along it in the opposite direction to which we wanted to go.

By this time Marion was a cross between a raging inferno and a quivering lump of jelly. We decided just to get out of #%%@$&%%$% Nimes in any direction. However with cars blocking the road because they wanted to queue up for petrol (these cars were from the cross road, not in the road we were driving down), drivers cutting in mercilessly and just about every other example of bad driving behaviour you can imagine, we eventually escaped Nimes.

Carefully, we navigated around the outskirts of Nimes avoiding going anywhere near the city centre. On the way back to the hotel we discovered the Supermarket that we were supposed to use as a signpost in the hotel's directions. It was on a different road as the A4 had two "Nimes Quest" exits

On getting back to the hotel we decided we better find out what the petrol queuing was all about. We were told that the transport unions were going to go on strike. (Not sure why this triggered all the panic petrol buying but it certainly did.)

Marion asked for a recommendation for a place to eat dinner with the proviso that it was not in Reims. (Marion swears she will never ever return to Nimes and I see little reason to.)

The recommended restaurant was in Nimes Quest opposite the football stadium.

One of our major problems throughout the whole trip has been selecting wines for dinner. From one night to the next we did not see the same wine listed on two different menus. Indeed we rarely saw the same vineyard, so remembering the name of that really tasty drop we had last night became pointless.

In desperation, I suggested that Marion randomly select a wine by closing her eyes and place her fork on the wine list and we would buy whatever the tines indicated. After checking that it wasn't going to cost hundreds of euros we ordered the wine, which turned out to be one of the best we've had during the entire trip. At least one thing turned out right for the day!

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Photos

Scenery
Some of the scenery we passed during our drive from Carcassonne.

More Scenery
More of the scenery, seen from inside our hire car.

Ugh!
The hideous altar in La Cathedrale.

Shrine
More of the horrible shrine in La Cathedrale.

New Cathedral
The newer Cathedral in Nimes - not particularly interesting.