I’m killing time in my sour squat, stretching and doing push-ups while batteries charge—camera, phone, Macbook—and the minutes crawl by like anaesthetised ants, thousands of them.
I’m sure Clermont has its good side but I get to see none of it. Scum, bums and gutters full of butts is it for this gypsy boy. At 8:10 I can stand the place no longer. I lug the bike pod down four flights of sticky stairs and wobble it to the station.
Bon chance! The clean comfortable train for Lyon already stands at platform H and platform H is directly in front of me. No stairs to negotiate. It departs to the second and arrives in time in Lyon, giving me time to buy a proper breakfast—sandwich, pain des raisins, and Orangina.
I’m living on sandwiches. This one goes under the pseudonym Classic Atlantique because it allegedly contains tuna, but somewhere in the Atlantic is as close as a fish ever got to my sandwich.
Train 17625 from Lyon to Grenoble departs on time. This train has a piper, a coffee-coloured youth with in a white singlet with Sideshow-Bob hair. He is swaying in the bike compartment, next to the pod, amusing himself with a bamboo flute while outside the Alpes hove into hazy view.
At Voiron a man walks up the platform with his ginger tabby in a pink plastic cat-cage. The other day I saw a bloke scamper across a Paris intersection with his cat in a wicker basket. Meanwhile the Alpes loom—instead of looking at them as a horizon, now I must look up to see their bald rocky summits.
Holy shit. I have to ride a flimsy piece of two-wheeled carbon fibre up these suckers. Sacre bleu!
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