June 1
Every village in the south of France is like a little medieval knot that there’s only one way to untie. If you drive a car into one of these places— and you shouldn’t— every decision you make commits you to a set of inescapable consequences. One wrong turn will lead to another and another, till finally your car gets wedged into a narrow alley and there’s no getting out. But if somehow you make all the right moves in just the right order (straight past the church, second right at the old lady walking her dog, then a left at the WW1 memorial), the knot unties and you drive out the other side.
There are a lot of knots to untie if you have the idea to rent a car so you can haul your bikes to Nice so you can catch a train to Sicily. That’s our plan: a one-way rental to the Gare de Nice-Thiers by way of the pretty town of Aix-en-Provence where there’s a shop that sells bike bags. It’s a bad plan that, at the time, I thought was a good plan.
Bike bags. In the parts of Europe that are bike friendly— Denmark, for instance— you can bring your bike on a train without too much trouble. Sometimes, there are whole train cars dedicated to bikes, with bike hooks and little racks where you can stash your saddle bags. But trains in Italy aren’t bike friendly. This comes as a surprise. I figured a country that’s famous for its pro cyclists and its artfully designed road bikes would be accommodating to bikes. Turns out, it’s not.
Since most trains in Italy don’t allow bikes on board, you need a bike bag, which is a big cheap polyester sack that you cram your bike into then pretend that it’s just a supersized piece of carry-on luggage. And luggage, of course, is allowed on the train.
It’s possible, if you’re not afraid to generalize recklessly, to see a bike bag as an example of how Italians possess a healthy disregard for rules and regulations. It’s a principle for Italians that rules are made to be broken. And if they can’t be broken, you should at least figure out a good loophole, like turning a bike into a bag. Then again, it’s not just the Italians. One of my French mother-in-law’s favorite expressions is “pas vu, pas pris” ("not seen, not caught”), which she likes to say when she’s running a red light or otherwise breaking the law and which is basically a worldview and a way of being.
The French word for a bike bag is “housse,” which is pronounced “whose,” as in “whose stupid idea is it to haul a couple bikes across Italy by train?” Years later, I will discover that sensible people who want to take a bike trip in Italy don’t buy bike bags. Instead, they sensibly rent their bikes at their destination. But, like I say, this useful insight is still years in the future. For now, we head to Aix-en-Provence to buy a couple bike bags.
We spend the night in Nice. I can’t sleep, so I stand on the little smoking balcony outside our hotel window. Across the street is a small seaside hotel that looks old, maybe from the 1920’s. Have you seen the movie “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday?” It’s that hotel.
The place looks like it’s been closed down for years. Dusty and dog-eared. I can see the breakfast room which still has lace curtains on the windows. I imagine that every morning, the dozen or so ghosts who haunt the place creak down the stairs and drift sleepily into the breakfast room for a café au lait and a croissant. They nod to each other and smile faint ghostly smiles, pleased that they chose such a fine hotel to spend eternity.
Later, I google the place up. It turns out the hotel isn’t closed down, it just looks that way. The online reviews alternate between people who stayed there and were horrified by it (it’s dirty and dilapidated and the owner is an asshole), and reviews obviously written by the owner who gushes about the charm of the hotel and the patience and good humor of the owner. Masquerading as a guest named “Jean de Lyon,” he writes: “To all the jaded people, the snobs, the tightwads, and the wicked ones, I advise humility and a sense of contentment.
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