Hiccups with Airbnb.
We left Salisbury, stayed with friends in Dover and caught a morning DFDS ferry to Dunkirk. Grabbing a few supplies to keep us going, (we bought most victuals from home as there is a certain relaxed feeling that arises from only needing to buy a bottle of good local wine for your first night) we headed off on the motorway.
This particular journey had a certain degree of uncertainty to it, namely where would we stay the first night?
Right to the day before we left, we were ‘unsure’ whether to camp or do Airbnb. Favourite Wife was ‘for camping’, but I’d found a couple of Airbnb’s that were as cheap as a campsite, and that would save having to pack camping gear. She (no not the cat’s mother) said it was up to me – but she thought we should camp. It took Favourite Eldest Daughter to ‘convince’ her that for once I was right.
This put us in the position of trying to book less than twenty-four hours before we would be arriving, and the host has twenty four hours to reply.
So there we were trundling along in that rather blithe fashion that a sparsely populated French motorway calls for, with no idea whether we would have a bed to rest in. Still no word from seemingly shy Airbnb lady.
It was after the twenty-four hours were up before we heard the news that we were unwelcome. Stress levels went up a step as we struggled to maintain 4G long enough to search for an alternative, and we could only find two in the area. We were less than an hour and a half from our hoped-for stop-off.
One of the ‘requests to book’ came back in the negative, the other wanted to know what time we would arrive. Presuming he was not wanting us to arrive too late we gave him a time we thought he would find convenient, about seven o’clock.
“Non”.
“Quelle heure vous conviendrait? Nous sommes désespérés” “What time would suit you? We are desperate?”
“Six heures” Six o’clock. We couldn’t make it by then.
“Six heures et quart?” A quarter past six?
“Oui, mais pas plus tard, je sors”. “Yes, but not later, I’m going out.”
Now Favourite Wife is not averse to a challenge, and I suspect she was secretly fancying the drama of having half (the younger half) of the French police force chasing her. Hunched over the wheel with a steely glint in her eye, a glint that would have made Toad of Toad Hall proud, she accelerated.
It was not to be, the traffic cops that is, but we were there by five past six.
Mine host greeted us briefly, handed us – two complete strangers – the keys to his house along with un bouteille de vin rouge, ushered his wife to their car and drove off!
We cooked our supper, fresh (well not tinned anyway), probably high in mercury Tuna, and that substance that immediately sets the sirens going for the Pronunciation Police – quinoa. Oh and a glass or several of the wet red stuff.
I don’t recall any problems with the nights sleep, perhaps vin induced. We started the next day heading back in the direction we had come. We were running on diesel fumes, and would definitely need wine that evening as well as fuel for car, oh yes and fuel for body that morning.
Our target was Dijon.
Being early Sunday morning we found un space pour le automobile, donned our berets and my fake moustache, and sidled into town. Bumped into friends from England! “déranger le déguisement n’a pas fonctionné.”
This was our first visit to Dijon, we found it a charming city, and spent too long on that sunny, rather lazy Sunday morning sitting in the sunshine ‘avec deux café et croissants’. We watched the pigeons preening and washing in the fountains, and small boys being scolded by parents for copying the pigeons.
The day was, as far as I recall, just regular two-hour stints of driving, steady stuff to maximise fuel economy and minimise carbon footprint. Eventually the hills became more and more dominant and we gained altitude. Casually as you please, appeared snow-capped peaks, and occasionally those ever rarer beastie’s – glaciers.
Pulling away from a brief stop at the sunny lakeside town of Savines-le-Lac, where we purchased flip-flops for me (they make showering a better experience I was informed) we headed up the Durance Valley towards the starting place of our trek, Mont- Dauphin Guillestre.
The sky grew dramatically black as a storm brewed ahead of us. The lightning came, with thunder that could be heard above the sound of the car, and then this typical alpine storm-cell vented its contents – the rain sounded like the massed drums of some ghostly Scottish regiment, drowning even the thunder. It was heavy enough to hide the lightning from view. The road became a river, the nearby supermarket car-park a lake.
Then it was gone, the sky turned light grey and our hearing returned. But we were struggling to locate the Airbnb.
The reply to our text happily confirmed us to be in the right place for our night’s stay, literally parked by the house.
It was over supper that we were astonished to discover that mine host was a Nordic Walking Champion, and to Favourite Wife’s delight, he even made his own energy balls. It was while carrying the bags into the house that I ‘did something’ that resulted in an agonising night of back pain, little sleep, and my sliding out of bed onto my hands and knees the next morning!