first mountain

On my first full day in France I walk more than 20 kilometres. Two English-language bookshops I stride across town to visit are shuttered—they have got the French bug.

So I pace back to the Musée de Moyenne Age whose twenty galleries of medieval unenlightenment, swords, wood and stone carvings, and dowdy tapestries have me screaming for mercy. The Dark Ages indeed. I hope The Lady and the Unicorn will take my breath away, but she doesn’t even make me pant.  

I ponce around Gares de Lyon and Montparnasse because I like railway stations—the possibilities seem endless. I ride the Metro from Maubert Mutualité to Jussieu (Line 10), from Jussieu to Place d’Italie (Line 7), then Place d’Italie to Bel Air (Line 6). From here I stroll the five kilometres of the Promenade Plantée.

The bookshop that is open, Shakespeare and Company, overwhelms. Such a small shop-front but it is books from floor to ceiling, crammed into horizontal or vertical space, and on oblique angles up the narrow staircase to the reading room.  

My feet kill. I shower and retire early. At 11:27 the bedside phone extracts me from the deepest slumber. The concierge tells me in fine English that he cannot order me a taxi to transport me and the bike pod four kilometres to Gare de Lyon in the morning.

I wake at 5:30 and sort, pack, communicate with Oz, and make final preparations. I break my fast at 7:15. Madame the proprietor rings for a taxi at 7:45. She is not hopeful. She tries a second company. A taxi will come from St Germain. But no taxi comes. It is 8:10 and the train to Clermont-Ferrand departs at 9:01.

Walking is impossible. Bus 63 is impossible—no bike pod any time. Too big. I could catch two RER trains. No, at peak hour this is tres difficile. I have no choice: I must push the pod at breakneck speed on its two tiny wheels through four kilometres of peak-hour Paris.

The pod bumps over gutters and rough bitumen. Each arm and hand aches by ever-diminishing turns as I cajole its dodgy bulk along the Rue des Ecoles, Rue Jussieu, Rue Cuvier, and along the Quai Saint Bernard where the house-boats sleep on the sluggish Seine.

At Place Valhubert outside the Jardin des Plantes I miraculously manouevre the beast across what would pass as the finishing straight at Le Mans only to find myself pushing the pod along a real bike track. The real cyclists shriek angry bonjours at me.

I escape by hauling the pod up the steps to the Ponte Charles de Gaulle and cross the Seine to the underground side-entrance to the Gare de Lyon. I have eleven minutes to find my train. I need them. The train is on Voie (platform) 9, but despite Wednesday’s reconnaissance I can’t find it.

I weave the pod a sea of bodies and platforms A to P. A sign indicates Voies 5 à 23 through an archway. Left or right?  Has to be right. Finally I roll the pod past car 1, car 2, car 3.

I strain and grunt the pod up the vertical stairs into the luggage bay of car 4, and at 8:57 I slump deliciously and delightedly in a pool of hot and smelly man-juices next to demure mademoiselle in seat 71. Poor thing.