Everyone gets here on a ferry. Everyone leaves here on a ferry. For all its notorious isolation and locked-down security posture, there’s something oddly endearing about making your arrivals and departures to and from Guantanamo Bay on a friendly little putt-putt of a ferry boat chugging its way through the Caribbean blue.

The ferry boat is a part of GTMO life because the naval station here, like the bay itself, has two sides – windward and leeward. The airfield is over on the leeward side but the vast majority of base life takes place on the windward side. Geographically speaking, in some imaginary simpler time, one could theoretically drive around the bay, through the Cuban portion of Cuba, and arrive at the other side, I suppose. These days, however, what with the non-existent road, the two guarded fencelines, the one active minefield (theirs), and the one mostly-cleared minefield (ours), there’s no, shall we say, advisable way to drive from leeward to windward. You could try, but you would die, possibly even twice.

CubaVacationTravel.com Does Not Actually Come Here

Better to take the ferry boat. Whether you’re coming or going, you get the gift of respite. Twenty-five minutes on the ferry, bobbing gently o’er the waves (or pitching violently depending on the bay’s mood). You can spend some time wondering whether the bi-weekly barge bringing fresh supplies to the base might be in port (possible), whether the flight bringing produce to the NEX has been delayed (probable), or even whether it’s really as hot as it seems today (oh, dear lord, yes). Perhaps it’s just the Pacific Northwesterner in me, but I love everything about ferries, especially the way they force you to slow down. There’s no requirement for reflection once you do slow down, but having already made it that far, one does tend to let one’s thoughts roam, a welcome interlude to stretch out and relax, mindset-wise.

You Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore

The ferry dock is also the site of one of my favorite Guantanamo Bay traditions – the Gitmo Gainer. A big part of military life is change. People are always pulling up stakes and heading off to their next duty stations, only to be replaced by new arrivals. “It’s never ‘goodbye’,” you’ll hear them say, “it’s always, ‘see you later’.” Even so, they do call a move a “permanent change of station,” so nothing is promised. Perhaps that’s why the military is so good at marking transitions with ceremonies big and small.

The 2017 Gilmer-Lehrman History Teacher of the Year for DoDEA Will Not Put Up with Any Packing-Related Nonsense

In the case of the Gitmo Gainer, it’s all about saying goodbye to friends and colleagues as they take their last ferry ride from the windward side to the leeward side and on to the airplane that will fly them to the next stage of their lives and careers. As departees board the ferry for the last time, squeezing out a few last hugs, holding back (or not) a few last tears, those left behind peel off their shirts, shed their shoes, and as the ferry boat sounds the final farewell blasts of its horn and rounds the last set of pilings, one by one, they leap waving into the water from the adjacent pier. Front flips, back flips, belly flops, and swan dives, one after another they leap, crash, and tumble into the sea, most in swimsuits, but some in full clothing, as their friends look on waving from the ferry’s top deck.

So long, Javi!

All hands on deck…

…and into the drink!

It’s sweet, it’s poignant, and it’s powerful. There’s an affirmational quality to it, something that speaks to what we share with our fellow human. Probably we don’t commemorate moments such as these quite enough, although perhaps they’d lose some of their power if we did (“And here comes Sid Heaton and – YES! – he is taking out the garbage AGAIN with correctly sorted recyclables. How does he DO it? Give that man a trophy.”).

With the end of school, we are now more or less at the peak of “PCS Season,” as they call it, which means we’ve been down at the ferry dock quite a lot these past few weeks, saying goodbye to friends as they ride that last ferryboat across the bay. Quinn’s really perfected his front flip at this point and Kinsey’s working a credible cannonball. Kristanne, the newly-minted, 2017 Gilmer-Lehrman History Teacher of the Year for DoDEA (seriously, isn’t that incredible!), has a sort of half-topple, half-step in thing she does that works for her.

Standing on the dock of the bay…

Tomorrow, it’s our turn. We’ll be taking our last ferry boat across the bay and I only wish that somehow I could take a quick jump off the pier for all the wonderful folks leaving with us and still make it back onto the ferry for our flight back to the US, back to California, back to our home in Nevada City.

Punching our tickets…

We had no idea what we’d find here when we decided to take a leap of faith some 18 months ago, how we’d feel about it once we arrived, or whether we were making a colossal blunder, the likes of which would make us the laughingstock of family gatherings for years to come. To be fair, Gitmo has not been without its ups and downs, but as we prepare to depart, I’m struck by how many wonderful people we’ve all been able to meet.

Certainly, we’ve loved other aspects of being here – the diving, boating, swimming, and snorkeling, as well as just the focus brought to one’s life when the outside distractions are few (seriously, we didn’t have cell phones here until about six months ago) – but it’s the people that rise above all of that. There’s something about the shared purpose of being here that really cements relationships. Sure, there’s also some shared misery at work here (hurricane evacuations, anyone?), but the sense of all being in it together has brought back feelings I dimly remember from my high school and college graduations – that sensation that some shared experience, some bond that only those that were there really felt, was about to change, suddenly, and irrevocably. That’s some powerful juju, right there, all the more so since I’m sharing it with my wife and kids.

Thanks so much, GTMO – it’s been an unexpected, crazy, and delightful experience. “See you later!”

Go Team GTMO!

bring your flip-flops…and your unlawful combatants, too

Welcome back to the Odyssey, now entering its third month here in the everyday suburbia of Guantánamo Bay. Gitmo has turned out to be a bit of an absurdist paradise, 47 square miles of cognitive dissonance, where you can start the day by attending a military commission for the notorious “9/11 Five,” break for some Taco Bell down at the local bowling alley for lunch, and wrap your day up with some “Classic Beach Lifestyle,” as the adjacent t-shirt suggests, indulging in a little leisurely beachcombing beneath the razor wire of the Camp Delta detention center. “Bring Your Flip Flops,” for sure, but mind the concertina, all the same.

you can practically see the cable cars!

Given the notoriety of Gitmo since 9/11, we can all be forgiven for visualizing it as a grim dungeon peopled exclusively by cackling CIA agents in rubber gloves and executioner’s hoods. So, it can be rather jarring when you first pull up to your sparkling new duplex in the Nob Hill subdivision and are greeted by smiling neighbors bearing plates of cookies, gaggles of apple-cheeked children curious about new potential playmates, and, naturally, a lovely view of the distant Sierra Maestra mountains, a view that is only briefly interrupted by a US guard tower on the perimeter fence and its Cuban counterpart somewhat further in the distance.

well, hello, gorgeous! revolution over yet?

The surreal sensations continue more or less everywhere you go. Turn right instead of left when leaving our subdivision and you find yourself jogging along a lovely country road through the coral tideflats. Gaze left and let your eyes linger on the lovely white cranes and graceful herons searching for their evening meal in the sun-shot, pink-hued gloaming of another lazy, Caribbean sunset.

not nearly as much fun as camp winnipesaukee

Gaze right and let your eyes recoil at the rusting bands of razor wire, overgrown with scrub grass and, naturally, the faded and deteriorating remnants of Camp X-Ray in the chain-linked distance. Yes, that Camp X-Ray. The one that earned Gitmo the nastier sides of its reputation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Still right there, just a mile or so from Nob Hill, as you can see there at right.

If you keep going past Camp X-Ray, you eventually come to the Northeast Gate between GTMO and Cuba proper. I mean, you would get there, if you were brave foolhardy enough to go past all the signs telling you not to go any further and you somehow managed to ignore the armed Marines waving their hands for you to stop. And the gunfire. And the anti-tank Czech hedgehog structures straddling the road at strategic choke points. Not that I’ve, err, tried this or anything. Cue nervous laughter and sheepish shuffling of feet.

You’re never going to get there, dude

Just as well – aside from the monthly meeting between the US and Cuban border guards, the Northeast Gate’s been closed since the revolution. Not that any of that stops the occasional gaggle of grandmas visiting the base from pushing a stroller down that road, past Nob Hill, past those warning signs, and into the waiting klieg lights of the Marine Corp Security Force Company. Sorry, grandma – it’s the enhanced interrogation techniques for you.

tell me more about that cognitive dissonance thing

This fundamental incongruity between expectations and how the place actually presents itself is probably what you notice most about Guantanamo Bay. It’s absolutely jarring in many respects, whether it’s:

• 

  the new patio furniture is here! the new patio furniture is here!

  The endearingly prosaic announcements on the reader board outside the commissary (“Patio Furniture Has Arrived!”).

• 

  of course there’s an irish pub in gitmo…it’s gitmo!

  The fact that there really is a credible attempt at an Irish pub here. It’s possibly the only Irish pub in the world staffed exclusively by Jamaicans, but that’s something that works entirely in its favor. Honestly, I can’t think of a single service in the world that would not be improved by being staffed exclusively by Jamaicans.

  Case in point – it’s not easy to find the phone number of anything here, even though the phone numbers are all only 4-5 digits long. So, we constantly find ourselves dialing Directory Assistance, something I haven’t done since, like, 1985. Anyway, after I thank the laid back Jamaican who’s given me whatever number I need this time, he always closes with a lilting, “Coooool, mon.” Man, I live for that. I call directory assistance three times a day just because I crave that kind of reassurance. Sure, I’ve got worries about my 401k and credible doubts about my ability to parent a teenager, but everything is cooool, mon. I gotta get a recording of that guy. And start writing down the phone numbers he tells me.

• 

  welcome to springfield, cuba

  The overarching sensation that much of the base presents as nothing more than your classic American suburb, plucked out of the midwest and plunked down on the dry side of your average Caribbean island. I mean, so long as your version of the “average” Caribbean island has been avowedly socialist since its revolution in the fifties, was the target of a failed invasion sponsored by the CIA in ’61, very nearly housed Russian-sourced nuclear weapons in ’62, and, since 9/11, has been the site of the world’s most notorious prison. In that case, yeah, totally average.

There is, of course, a method to the figurative madness here and it’s got everything to do with keeping literal madness at bay for those stationed here.

don’t you mean keeping it “at guantanamo bay”?

No, I don’t. Not even I would stoop to that pun. Which is why it’s fortunate that I’ve got a handy, imaginary “alternative me” making the really bad puns in headings like that one up there. Thanks, buddy.

you’re welcome!

could be worse — it could be on the barge

Guantanamo Bay is probably not the easiest duty station in the world. It’s isolated, it’s hot, it’s completely shut off from the outside world (only six flights per month!), and you almost never get new patio furniture. The grocery store suffers from occasional stocking issues. The internet arrives via satellite for most of the base and is two-tin-cans-and-a-string slow. Regular cell phones do not work. Anything you order over the internet arrives via a semi-mythical barge that is purported to arrive in GTMO once every two weeks. No one has ever actually seen this barge. Some believe the barge exists, if only because Amazon Prime orders eventually do arrive, sometimes as quickly as two weeks after the initial order.

Regular Amazon orders of the non-Prime variety? Yup – still on the barge, waiting to be delivered by the ubiquitous base iguanas and their perpetual bad attitudes. There’s a popular bumper sticker here that reads, “My other car is on the barge,” which I’m starting to think is just base code for “My other car was stolen by iguanas.” Very slowly, as you can see in that picture down below.

iguana delivery — when it really doesn’t matter when (or whether) you get it

 slow amazon deliveries? however do you endure, my good man?

In the greater scheme of things, most of these GTMO peccadilloes play as minor annoyances and, in some cases, are actually kind of nice. For example, it’s a semi-refreshing experiment to see how much your daily life revolved around obsessively checking email and the web when you can no longer readily do either of those things. Turns out I used to like to read and play guitar, Kristanne could bake bread from scratch, and both kids were accomplished belly dancers. Who knew?

at home in nob hill with the heatons

Still, the aggregate of these Gitmo Gotchyas (not a trademark…yet) can start to weigh on you, which is why the Department of Defense has put a whole lot of effort into making you feel like you never left Anytown, USA. Take for example, our particular suburb of Nob Hill. We live in an as-new, 3BR duplex, complete with a garage and a white picket-fenced backyard that make it feel every bit the averaged and idealized version of the American home. Even the attention paid to the standard American practice of giving subdivisions wildly optimistic names completely at odds with their surroundings helps you feel at home a bit. Sure, “Nob Hill,” Guantanamo Bay, has about as much to do with the real Nob Hill in San Francisco as “Cabernet Ridge” in Stockton has to do with vineyards or “Serenity Shores at Fulton Ranch” has to do with, well, much of anything at all, but that just adds to the Americanizing effect. Don’t I sound soothed?

hey, they were expecting us!

This is not to say we don’t love it here in Nob Hill. Quite the contrary, in fact. Not only did our house come with the perfect graffiti pre-carved into its backyard banyan tree, as you can see there at left, but it also has a seemingly endless supply of waving neighbors, hard-playing kids, and the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit that comes when you actually are all in this together. Plus, it’s all free. Yup – free! The home maintenance plan is excellent, too – you call and they come over to fix it, no charge. I much prefer this to my standard, stateside home maintenance plan, which I typically start with twelve trips to the hardware store, continue by screwing up the job in increasingly inventive and ever more expensive ways, and wrap the whole thing up by paying someone else to fix what I broke. Did I mention I’m not very handy?

So, yes, I’d most definitely like to take this opportunity to thank you, the American taxpayer, for all of this. Yes, you, the one muttering under your breath, angrily stamping your feet, and looking for new federal bird sanctuaries in Oregon to commandeer. Thanks, bro! I’m just going to have another sip of this free mint julep here on my air-conditioned back porch and check my portfolio while the government unclogs my toilet and massages my back.

REALLY HOPING THE TOILET UNCLOGGER GUY ISN’T MASSAGING YOUR BACK, TOO

helpful teenager or armed seditionist? you be the judge.

Taunting armed seditionists is much easier from Guantanamo Bay than in person, I find. If it makes you feel any better, I did have to pay my son to mow the lawn after he threatened to take over the downstairs laundry room while armed with Nerf guns. Armed insurrection has been a new hobby of his since we arrived here.

the ping-pong tables are on the other side of the curtain. really!

It’s not just the housing and maintenance that’s free, either. Gym? Free. Open 24×7, too, with two full basketball courts (one featured there at right), racquetball, enough free weights to make Jack LaLanne blush, and every aerobic machine under the sun. Electricity, gas, and water? So free it would give your average extortionary PG&E exec the full-on heebie-conniptions.

very large and very free

Swimming pool? Free. It’s also huge, uncrowded, and equipped with some fairly epic slides, the likes of which would make a stateside personal injury lawyer salivate, as you can see there at left. Golf course? Free, though you do have to pay to rent a cart (and trust me, Cuba’s standard face-melting temperatures will make you want to rent the cart. Plus, no sales tax!).

kristanne relaxes after massacring a few dozen skeeters at the lyceum

First-run movies? Free, and delivered to TEAM GTMO (check the sign in the background of the picture at right) in a charming outdoor theater somewhat ambitiously referred to as “The Lyceum.”

One of the great things about the outdoor movies here, besides being free, is that, if the movie stinks, you can always pass the time stargazing at the incredible Caribbean night skies and/or waging a ceaseless battle against fist-sized mosquitoes bent on malarial destruction. That’s usually an “and” situation, by the way, and not an “and/or.” That’s Kristanne there at right, flexing her way through her usual post-mosquito-massacre trash talk and taunt session, featuring lots of aggressive posturing and classic lines adapted from past adventures, such as, “Stupid little mosquito – all your friends are dead.”  They say Gitmo changes people, but I was really hoping they didn’t mean my wife. And rebel son.

…if only the beer were.

Beer? Not free, alas. It also occasionally comes with the reminder that neither is freedom, as you can see there at left. Somebody’s gotta pay the bill somewhere down the line, I suppose, starting with me, who has to face the horror of a single, solitary grocery store stocked nearly exclusively with mass-produced domestic lagers, full of rice, gingerbread, and other things that have no business being in beer. It’s an Anheuser-Busch hell here in GTMO, I tell you, and I am barely holding on. Somebody get me Directory Assistance on the line, stat.
Coo-o-o-o-oool, mahhn.

hmm…sounds like someone might have nothing to lose but his chains

where the “c” definitely does not stand for “communism”

The massive irony of all this free stuff, of course, is that we are living on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, a place that from the late ’50s to the collapse of the Soviet Union, was seen primarily as yet another Cold War domino, a staunch-but-lonely bulwark against the otherwise unchecked flow of creeping communism across our embattled US borders. A capitalist thumb in the eye of Fidel Castro, if you will. A beacon of democracy and freedom amidst the roiling waters of failed banana republic socialism, for crying out loud. All that, and here we are enjoying the fruits of the most enjoyably socialist lifestyle I’ve ever experienced (and, mind you, I’ve lived in both France and pre-1989 Poland, two places that occupy rather opposite ends of my highly subjective Enjoyable Socialism Spectrum). Heck, I may even invite Bernie Sanders to come on down, don the highly reflective waistbelt we’re all required to wear when outdoors after dark, and go for a little jog – it’s that enjoyably socialist, my friends.

Probably the best part of the GTMO lifestyle, though, is how it wholeheartedly embraces and actualizes one of the tenets of socialism that is not often delivered in practice – the part where everyone takes responsibility for what’s around them and works together towards a common good. Everywhere you go on base, there are people working. Soldiers working at their jobs. Soldiers cleaning up the base. Jamaican and Filipino workers keeping the base operating. Civilians working on lucrative contracts for Halliburton-like conglomerates making major, tax-free bank.

hey, that’s “Mr. Smarty Pants of the Week” to you, pallie

There’s really not anyone here who isn’t supposed to be here for some reason or another, except for, well, me. And frankly, after being crowned “Smarty Pants of the Week,” I’m pretty sure I’m newly in charge of Smartass Responses to the public library’s weekly trivia question on Facebook. Hey, you gotta start somewhere (and you might as well get two MWR GTMO Community Library bookmarks and a pack of “Nerds” for your trouble). Maybe if I win two weeks in a row, I’ll get some patio furniture. The dream lives on.

what’s up with the patio furniture obsession, weirdo?

That’s it for this week on The Odyssey. I still hold out high hopes for someday being able to write shorter, more frequent entries, same as I do for a successful Van Halen reunion with David Lee Roth and the return of my hair. In other words, don’t hold your breath, y’all. And, if you do, be sure to call Gitmo Directory Assistance right after. He’ll make you feel better right away.
Coo-o-o-o-oool, mahhn.

We’ve been hearing the whispers for some time now — we’re too old. Too slow. Boring and sedate. Out of touch with today’s now generation. And it’s not just our own children saying those things any more, either — literally both of the years since we left France, we’ve received, like, two emails saying we were “no longer very Extreme at all” and “barely even telecommuters.” And, though I must say that it seems extremely suspicious that both of those emails came from addresses like “definitelynotkristanne@officeodyssey.com” and “oppositeofyourwife@gmail.com,” the point is, nonetheless, well-taken — we needed a pick-me-up. The ol’ proverbial shot in the arm, adrenaline-wise. We needed questionable interrogation tactics, extra-legal status, and a locked-down environment so notorious for these things that it has become synonymous with them, the world over.

you wanted us on that wall; you got us on that wall

Yep. We needed Gitmo.

laying it on a bit thick here, aren’t you?

from germany to california to…cuba?

Well, “needed” might be phrasing it a bit too affirmationally. We didn’t really need Guantanamo Bay so much as we might be willing to accept it in a pinch. You know, if, like, we couldn’t get the visas for the Russian steppes, Bangladeshi slums, or, uh, Stockton, a city that exists expressly to be derided in comparisons like this one.

The lesson here, as always, is to be exceedingly careful with what you’re willing to accept in a pinch. Some things, as it turns out, pinch back. For those of you who are subtext-challenged, I’m referring here to Guantanamo Bay and not those hale and hearty movers hefting Kristanne’s well-traveled childhood piano into a moving truck and sending it on its merry way to Cuba in that picture up there. Those guys, in their identical hoodies, SF Giants caps, Doc Martens shorts, and high-top sneakers, are actually cloned from top-notch moving-man DNA in a test-tube in an undisclosed location in the Salinas Valley and do an excellent job, if I do say so myself.

I do believe I digress. Sorry. It’s a reflex.

so is acid reflux. pal

u-haul..and haul…and haul…

The back story here is that the Heaton family had already been navigating a fairly epic season of stakes-pulling before the prospect of Cuba even appeared in our headlights like a sun-addled deer with a deathwish. Way back in the dimly recalled days of, err, mid-August, a combination of job uncertainty in Nevada City and exciting opportunities on the coast had us lighting out for Santa Cruz on notice so short that some of our neighbors only realized we were gone several weeks later during one of my some seventy-six thousand U-Haul trips back and forth to get our myriad belongings packed, transported, and/or stored so that renters could take occupancy.

…you can see why we would want to get the heck out of here

It didn’t seem real at the time and in some ways, it still doesn’t. Perhaps that initial sense of unreality, of being loosed from one’s longtime moorings in Nevada City made it easier to accept what came next. Or, perhaps, as one friend put it, “What the hell is wrong with you?” Thanks, Mom. That helps. Because what came next, after a mere three months in Santa Cruz, was, of course, Cuba.

wait – guantanamo bay is in cuba?

Well, not really Cuba, per se, so much as <salsa>¡la Bahía de Guantánamo, el puerto mas rico del mundo!</salsa>. Is the Spanish and salsa music helping sell it? Does it seem more exotic now? Are you picturing me wiggling my hips in exaggerated Latin dance fashion while you read this? Hmm. Perhaps your browser doesn’t support the <salsa> tag. Or perhaps you’re still mentally reeling from picturing the 48-year-old bald, white guy with the exaggerated Latin hip action. Either way, let’s just be blunt here and break this the heck on down — we were going to (insert expletive here) Gitmo.

As any jihadist worth his 72 virgins will tell you, it’s a long road to Gitmo. For us, the road started several ago when Kristanne first started getting qualified to teach for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS). These are American schools for the children of service people stationed on overseas military bases, of which the US has more than a few. When you submit an application to teach at these schools, you can check the boxes of all the schools where you would accept a teaching position. If you are offered a job at one of the schools whose box you checked and you do not accept, well, it’s black ball time for you, Charlie — you head to the back of the line for any future openings, you definitely do not pass go, and a small army of gnomes with Dick Cheney grimace faces come out and kick you repeatedly in the tuchus while shaking their tiny, gnarled fists at you. The DoDDS employment process is actually a bit surreal.

fuhgeddaboutit —  it’s the dick cheney-faced gnomes for you, sluggo

So, there’s some game theory at work in the application process. Some cold-blooded calculus. As a new teacher, your odds of magically being offered a position at the gloriously scenic middle school in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, pictured there at right, high in the Bavarian Alps, are not particularly good. Sure, check that box, buy that Powerball ticket, but don’t react in slackjawed bewilderment when you somehow don’t get that gig. No, my young, would-be DoDDS padwan, your game will be played out among those cellar-dwelling checkboxes down there at the bottom end of the form. Your game will play out in a toxic, sell-your-soul-at-the-crossroads contest of How Low Will You Go? Would you accept…Bahrain? How about Guam? What Faustian bargain is a bridge too far for you? It feels a bit like one of those Japanese TV game shows that trade in mockery and public humiliation, except in this one, you don’t get stripped to your underwear, doused in whipped cream, and faceslapped with Kobe beefsteaks. No, you just have to go to Gitmo. So, I guess the comparison is not entirely without its parallels.

no guinness for you, Fidel!

Once you’ve held your nose and checked the box of the school you least want but will perhaps grudgingly tolerate, it’s a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man truism that, of course, that’s the school that will offer you a job. Which is exactly what happened a mere three months into our move to Santa Cruz — the good folks at WT Sampson High School in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came calling, offering Kristanne a job teaching all manner of different social studies, up to and including Advanced Socialist Taunting Studies, a course that requires all of the students to wear t-shirts like the one pictured there at left. Incidentally, I can’t wait to buy both this t-shirt and the one from Radio GTMO with the “Rockin’ in Fidel’s Backyard” slogan, both of which are actual, real things.

So, in situations like this, when presented with life-changing opportunities, with — if you will — two roads clearly diverging in Robert Frost’s proverbial yellow wood, I find that it’s best practice to sit quietly and reflect. To ponder what might be the best course of action for heart, soul, family, and, yes, pocketbook. Where will our loftiest aspirations be realized? Where will our noblest purposes be served? What is the sound of one hand clapping and can one hear it in Gitmo?

robert frost, robert schmrost

you can see why we didn’t get the toyota sienna

But that’s just me. Kristanne, on the other hand, packs the dang car, slaps a homemade officeodyssey.com bumper sticker on the tailgate, and pretty much just gits ‘er done. Okay, then. Enough navel-gazing. Let’s go to Gitmo and do some Naval-gazing instead!

OH, ferchrissakes…Really?

I do believe the classic Office Odyssey rules still apply and I am allowed at least one wince-worthy pun per episode. It’s in my contract and everything. And, honestly, with Guantanamo Bay being a US Naval Station, any reader who’s even remotely been paying attention for the last, uh, 15 years KNEW I was going to make the whole “navel/naval” pun earlier rather than later. You’re welcome. You are now free to read on, pun-free, for the remainder of the installment.

alright, get on with it then, chuckletrousers

Truthfully, there was not much reflection that needed to be done. Living overseas, especially in a DoDDS environment has been a goal of ours for years. So, even though Guantanamo Bay was not our first choice of schools, it was still incredibly attractive. It’s sort of like that old “Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars” adage, except in this case, you share the stars with terrorists in orange jumpsuits on hunger strikes. I may need a better adage here.

i do solemnly swear, dude

In the days and weeks (and weeks) to come, we kept checking in with one another. Were we sure this was the right move? Were we still excited at the prospect instead of filled with the nameless dread that accompanies tax audits, executions, and Billy Joel albums? In every case, the answer was a resounding Yes. And so as the weeks wore on and the forms were filled out, signed, notarized, and scanned, one by one in their uncounted hundreds, our resolve stayed firm. We are, after all, savvy veterans of the French bureaucracy — we know from forms. Incidentally, if you ever need to take an oath in front of a notary like Kristanne is doing there at left, I highly recommend doing it in Santa Cruz. There’s nothing quite like the hilarity of swearing to “defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and then have the notary respond in his best surfer drawl, “Cool, dude.” Cool, indeed, dude. Cool, indeed.

Even the torturous moving process, coming so soon on the heels of our last move from Nevada City to Santa Cruz, found us undaunted, mainly because those aforementioned, lab-born moving dudes pictured near the top of this post did all of it for us. Seriously. All of it. I may never purchase another roll of tape for the rest of my life.

riding in cars with cats is fun! especially in the central valley, the place where fun went to die

No, the only thing that daunted us were our dang cats, both of whom had to ride in cat carriers in our car all the way from San Francisco to LA, a trip they’d be only too happy to recount for you in excruciating, yowl-ridden detail, if only they weren’t so scarred from the subsequent flights from LA to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Norfolk, and, finally, from Norfolk to Cuba.

you know what makes showing up at the airport at 3:30 AM better? cats. that’s what.

Fortunately for us, we were spared the bulk of their endless litany of complaint because they spent the majority of their time down in baggage, a place where I firmly believe they actually have a great time, sipping on catnip martinis and chasing designer laser pointer dots. It’s like a secret kitty club down there, right? Sadly, I was disabused of this rosy perception when some overly strict interpretations of what constitutes a legal cat carrier resulted in both cats needing to occupy a single carrier, on our laps, for the last two legs of the trip. Hell hath no fury like a pet-owning airline agent who’s apparently never seen a duct-taped cardboard box with punched airholes before. Sheesh — it’s a classic.

happy place…peaceful blue…happy place

So, yeah, for those two legs of the trip, we were treated to a solid four hours of KCAT, the radio station that plays All Cat Complaints, All The Time. At top volume. On repeat. Fortunately, it was a tolerant bunch on our flight, from the GIs and base employees heading back “home” to GTMO after Christmas holidays in the states, all the way to the representatives of the “Toes in the Sand” production company, heading to the island from their Florida headquarters to produce the New Years Eve “Headbanger’s Ball” concert taking place over at the Tiki Bar in a couple days. Gitmo is pretty much full of these hilarious contrasts that sound like you’re inventing them from whole cloth…so much so, in fact, that you start to take it for granted. In this case, our new eyes definitely registered the visually amusing juxtaposition of shorn-headed, heavily-muscled GIs and bearded, headbanging music-bizzers. I like to think that we helped bring these disparate groups together by uniting them in their shared hatred of both us and our furshlugginer cats. It’s just a service we provide.

just like in all the al-Qaeda postcards!

Mercifully for all of us, though, Guantanamo Bay eventually appeared out our unblackened airplane windows, unmistakable in shape yet surprising in size, as you might be able to make out there at right. This is a complicated way of saying that I knew what it was, but it was bigger than I expected. Did I mention I get paid by the word?

The base actually straddles the bay, with the airstrip on the western (leeward) side and most of the base facilities on the eastern (windward) side. When you land, the first thing you notice is that it’s a bit barren here in Guantanamo Bay. It’s in the rain shadow of the Sierra Maestra, a mountain range that sucks up the vast majority of the incoming moisture, so much so that it includes honest-to-goodness, UNESCO-rated rain forests, none of which we can visit unless we brave the minefield outside the perimeter fence. So far, Kristanne has nixed that approach, but I’m working on her. Further bulletins as events warrant. Perhaps we’ll achieve my long-term family goal of becoming a bona-fide International Incident. Dream big, I always say.

wait, I was told ricardo montalban would be here…

Once you’re off the airplane, things take a bit of a summer campy turn, so long as your summer camps were proctored by serious-faced young men and women carrying automatic weapons. There’s no need to get your bags, or anything — those are all ferried across to the windward side for you, where you’ll be able to pick them up in a couple hours. Nah, just get on the big yellow schoolbus with everybody else for the five-minute ride to the ferry landing. Then, take the ferry across to the windward side, where everyone’s parked their cars for two weeks with the windows open and the keys inside to await their return. Seriously — would you steal a car in Gitmo? There’s a fence. And that minefield again. And, believe it or not, a somewhat visible security presence. Because, you know — Gitmo?

With two and a half days of bleary-eyed travel in our rearview mirror, much of these first impressions hazed their way across our consciousness like shared hallucinations. Was that really a giant iguana on the side of the road? Was there really a big McDonalds in “downtown” Gitmo? Was our new, government-issued house really in a suburban development somewhat optimistically named “Nob Hill”? Would the cats’ apparently bionic voiceboxes ever give out? Yup, yup, yup, and no, not now, not ever.

post-xmas sale: how many fruitcakes did they expect Gitmo resident to actually bake?

Kristanne’s new principal kindly loaned us a car so we could get around base for our first couple days. Although exhausted upon arrival, we decided to head on down to the Naval Exchange to buy a few necessaries. The Naval Exhange — the “NEX”  or commissary in the local parlance — is the end-all and be-all of local commerce. The good news about the NEX is that if it doesn’t have what you need, you really don’t need to go anywhere else looking for it, mainly because there is no “anywhere else.” The bad news, of course, is that it occasionally doesn’t have what you need. And it also carries discount fruitcake baking supplies, as you can see there at right — strike two.

But in all fairness, for being the size it is, the NEX does a remarkably good Target impersonation, carrying a good selection of groceries, clothing, hardware, consumer electronics, and fatigues. What, you’ve never been to Target fatigues section?  You can also get your hair cut, rent a car, buy a Subway sandwich, take out a small business loan, or take your choice of a wide variety of Gitmo-themed shot glasses, many of which feature the inimitable “It don’t git mo better than this” tag line. Needless to say, I bought thirty of these. You all now know what you’re getting for Christmas.

Life on a military base is going to be an educational process for this family of civilians, many of which I’ll elaborate on in future installments. Although Kristanne has a leg up on the rest of us by virtue of her childhood years growing up around different overseas US military installations, even she is a little rusty and occasionally forgets which flag to face when which trumpet piece is playing over the loudspeakers that blanket the base. For me, I’m never more than one boneheaded blunder from permanent base exile. That’s actually not all that much different than how I live my life stateside, so I’m somewhat used to it. I did get an object lesson on this topic during our first NEX trip, though. When we pulled up, I was happy to see that there was a prime parking spot waiting for me right in front of the door. Owing to my inheritance of excellent parking luck from my father-in-law, Calvin, this did not particularly surprise me, so I rolled right in, cocksure of my rightful role in the parking universe.

I’m a big fan of the General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard…does that count?

Yeah. Not so much in GTMO. Here in GTMO, we’ve finally found the place where Calvin’s enviable powers no longer apply. Here in GTMO, you need stars on your shoulderboards if you’re going to park in front of pretty much anything except your own house, a lesson Kristanne and the kids were only too happy to point out with a sassy display of wagged fingers and much neener-neener-neenering. Sigh. I’m totally going to get kicked out of this place.

That’s it for this installment from Nob Hill in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or, as we like to call it, “home.” Now that we’ve got you up to date with where we are and why, I have high hopes for shorter, more frequent installments as we get up to speed with island life, Gitmo style. See you next time on the Odyssey!

Burgundian Lounging: Better Get a Permit

Living in France requires an occasionally stunning amount of paperwork, with untold registrations, validations, and certifications, all signed, countersigned, and filed in triplicate with the proper authorities, of which there are many. No matter what it is that you want to do — skydive, tiger fight, eat breakfast — the likelihood is that you’re going to need to fill out a form or two before you can do it. You might have to do it in someone’s presence. You might have to receive a registered letter at your purported address. You might even need to get screened for tuberculosis or sing a credible version of la Marseillaise (true on the former; not so much on the latter…yet).

We were hipped to this early and often during our stay here, starting with our first abortive attempts to open a checking account. In the US, opening a bank account requires little more than ten bucks and a pulse. You’re in and out with a checkbook, 30-year mortgage, and home equity line in under 20 minutes, possibly with a free toaster for your troubles. Not so much in France. Instead, you start with polite letters of introduction indicating your interest, after which you are granted an audience some several weeks in the future. This is despite the fact that the relevant bank official’s calendar is completely open that afternoon and every afternoon between then and the proposed appointment two weeks hence. That’s just how it’s done – it wouldn’t be proper to rush into these things. No, no…it’s far better to have a certain seductive quality to your bank account opening, unfolding tantalizingly over time. Watching your debts accumulate and struggling with your inability to acquire electricity, power, and cell phone service without a checking account only adds to the sweet suffering.

Dancing In Public: Not Without a License

When the day of the appointment finally arrives, there are many pleasantries and bon mots exchanged, with small gifts for your children and discussions of vacation plans future and past. Then, you limber up your wrists with some light calisthenics and start signing stuff. Lots of stuff. Stuff you didn’t even know existed, with promises and waivers and sheafs and reams of paper. You get insurance you didn’t you know you needed…at least two kinds. You actually do need it, you’ll find out, when it comes time to enroll the kids in school. Our initial appointment took two hours and a box of Bic’s best.

Once you finally wrap up the initial appointment, you’re given to understand that a registered letter will be sent to your address. There’s no telling when it might come exactly…sometime in the next 10 days or so. Your account will not be valid until such time as that registered letter reaches you, is signed by you, and makes its way back to the bank. If you miss the registered letter, the whole cycle starts anew, except with much disappointed tongue-clucking from your bank representative and an admonition that one should always be at the house to receive the registered letter and more discussion of vacation plans and in-person bank visits. I’ve spent more time in bank offices during this year in France than I have in the previous 10 in the USA. I feel like I should have a little parting gift for my bank representative, Madame Revelen, who, in all seriousness, is a charming soul, always quick to comment on our improving French language skills during our many visits over the months. Did I mention that she went to Senegal for vacation this year? It’s true. Had a great time, too. And, yes, her husband’s health is improving…it’s kind of you to ask.

We went through this fun little registered-letter rigamaboogie two times before the hotel manager at the residence hotel where we were staying just up and signed the thing for us (it has to be done in the postman’s presence) with an illegible symbol of some sort. That was enough to get us back on Madame Revelen’s calendar for the long-awaited closing, the day when the registered letter would attest to our physical presence-hood and enable us to get an ATM card, a checkbook, and a standing monthly lunch appointment with Madame Revelen herself.

Sharing Desserts: Requires Form

Having a checking account is not a trivial thing in France. As I alluded to earlier, you cannot really live here without one – the fondness for all things paper creates a steady stream of check writing. For example, Quinn was in a fencing program this year. Rather than pay for the whole thing up front, the standard practice was to write five checks and give them all to them at the start of the program. Then, they’d cash them as the months went on, most likely after calling Madame Revelen to confirm that we were who we said we were and not a family of dastardly fencing-program thieves, bent on cheating the sabermaster. We did the same for Kinsey’s basketball program, Quinn’s baseball program, our French lessons…on and on in a ceaseless orgy of furious check-writing, until I finally learned how to spell all the numbers in French when written in longhand. “Ceaseless orgy” may be pushing it, but you get the picture.

On the day of what we foolishly thought might be our last appointment with Madame Revelen, we practiced up our best French greetings, debated and agreed that we wouldn’t faire les bisous with her (the French cheek kiss exchange), and showed up five minutes early to ensure there were no mishaps. All-too-predictably, an easy 40 minutes of fresh paperwork ensued, followed by the moment of truth – the validation of our signature on the registered letter.

With a dramatic flourish, Madame Revelen unsheathed the signed registered letter from her daunting hillock of materials. Donning her reading glasses, she held it up to the light, probing its authenticity for any crannies of doubt, turning it this way and now that. She may have bitten it once. Then, with an approving nod of her head, she gave us the coveted, “Eez good,” snapped her fingers twice, and we were in. Strobe lights flashed, a disco ball descended from the ceiling, and fresh flutes of champagne found their way to our hands. The lights dimmed, and Madame Revelen presented our checkbook and ATM cards, beguilingly perched on a crimson, velveteen pillow. Clearly, this was the France we’d been missing!

So much paperwork, they tick themselves off

Properly Permitted Photo

It’s not as if the French aren’t self-aware about this excessive administration syndrome – heck, the only thing they love more than filling out forms is complaining about having to do it. It’s practically a national sport, with entire television channels given over to titanic tantrums and tirades chastising the powers that be for being so, well, French. And, yes, it’s fairly certain that you need to fill out several forms to participate in those forums, but, as always, you’re encouraged to kvetch about it the entire time.

We were reminded of this Phrench Phenomenon a few weeks ago when our fifteenth anniversary rolled around. Neither the lunch reservations nor the exchange of gifts required any sort of paperwork, though perhaps they should have, given that the hostess at the restaurant checking our reservation straightfacedly misheard my pronunciation of “Monsieur Heaton” as “Monsieur Chicken,” occasioning no small amount of barely stifled guffaws from Kristanne. Turns out people who grew up with the last name of “Bohner” have a rather schadenfreudesque outlook on embarrassing mispronunciations of other people’s last names. Fair enough. Mr. Chicken gets it.

Don’t Worry: She’s Licensed for That

What did require a license, however, was golfing. Frankly, we should have seen this one coming, given that every other sport in France labors under an unrelenting set of exacting tests and achievements designed to chart your progress towards presumed perfection. We saw this with skiing, with the six or seven different levels kids pass through on their way to the coveted Etoile d’Or (“Gold Star”). Quinn had a similar system with fencing, as did Kristanne and I with our mastery of the French language (we topped out at the “Tin Asterisk of Slightly Less Embarrassing Accents”…not bad!). So, yeah, of course golf requires a license and naturally there are tests you can pass to document your knowledge and skills, progressing through different colors of “Flagstick” badges that you can wear on your lapel as you play or just perhaps point to and make “neener, neener, neener” noises when confronted with someone whose flagstick badge is not quite up to your own level. Maybe that’s just me.

Lucky for us, the license wasn’t hard to get – in our case, it cost the usual embarrassment of some bad French, which we are quite used to by now, thank you very much, plus five euros each, and, naturally enough, a couple forms wherein we declared our vitals and our non-intention to do the game of golf any harm, now or in the foreseeable future. Easy-peasy and good enough for a lovely nine holes in the sun.

And that seemed to be the end of it, until just last week when our official French Federation of Golf licenses arrived in the mail, complete with that snazzy “Mr. Chicken” logo in the middle. Still not sure how they found out about that. Kristanne may be taking the schadenfreude a little too schadenfar.

You can’t imagine how exciting this is. Not only are we now fully licensed to play anywhere in France (and any countries with exchange policies and similarly fussy attitudes towards requiring licenses to play golf), but we also get discounts on rental cars, Ryder Cup gear, and bank accounts with Société Générale bank…as if Madame Revelen would ever allow that or forgive us for trying to leave the family there at BNP Paribas. Yep, it’s all looking pretty good for us now. Just have to get one more form filled out by my doctor and submitted to my club for it to be all official-like, as you can see in that picture below. And, of course, there’ll also be the forms needed to secure and undertake a doctor’s appointment. After that, it may be time for Mr. Chicken to take his bad French skills on one of those TV shows and unleash a few pent-up demons. With Madame Revelen’s approval, of course.

It’s Blurred Because I Cannot Have My French Golfing Identity Compromised

what’s going on?

Kind of you to ask, and as you might expect, it involves filling out forms and checking off boxes. We’re solidly in the end-game here in Grenoble, packing up the apartment, filling out the customs forms at the post office, filling out the end of service forms with the gas, electric, water, internet, and TV companies. I think even my one-time nemesis, the baker, is hoping to get some sort of quick certificate of departure out of me, no doubt as proof to the government that his pain au chocolate sales are about to decline precipitously, entitling him to a short-term support payment from the Aid to Bakers with Dependent Families fund.

We’re also saying our goodbyes, and trying to get our heads around starting an old life anew. It’s a surreal feeling, but there’s so much to do, there’s not a lot of time to process any of it. We’ll be here in Grenoble through 7/19, after which, we’ll spend 6-7 days wending our way over to London for a quick visit with the Travelator before heading back to San Francisco on 7/30. Full circle. Hopefully, there will be time to add a few entries along the way!

See you next time…on the Odyssey!

After ten hard-charging, pile-driving, train-feng-shui-ignoring days on the road in Italy and Provence, your Extreme Telecommuters were a well-oiled, performance-tuned, fire-snorting beast of a sightseeing machine. We could knock out a UNESCO site in the morning, blaze through a Plux Beaux Village in the afternoon, and complete a week’s worth of grocery shopping in the 90 seconds before the local Carrefour grocery store closed for the evening, leaving a trail of stunned clerks drooling in slack-jawed amazement in our wake.

With that level of performance at our beck and call, it was a bit of a shame that the whole experience had to be put out to pasture for a week, temporarily mothballed and otherwise back-burnered while the kids went back to “school” and I did my “job.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who will remark on this, but there’s an almost eerie resonance here with the career arc of one Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Yes, that Michael Jordan. Ah – so you see it, too. Yep, it’s almost exactly like that time His Airness abruptly retired from basketball in order to play baseball, doing it when he was at the absolute apex of his career, coming off his third consecutive championship, and still able to dominate legions of would-be contenders effortlessly. As you can see in the picture, there are some strong parallels between Air Jordan in a baseball uniform and, say, Air Calvin & Rosalie taking the kids to the library in Grenoble instead of taking them competitive bodysurfing in Cannes. Fish out of water, all of them.

let’s compare medieval canals to rappers and dis spain in the process

You can really only keep Calvin & Rosalie in the garage for so long before the open road beckons and they must once again heed its siren call. This is just a metaphor, by the way – we don’t actually have a garage. Even if we did, I probably wouldn’t put my in-laws in it. Too easy for them to escape. Hah! Cheap in-law jokes are surprisingly fun, though I’m told by the unnamed person leaning over my shoulder and reading this as I write it that that’s the last one I’ll ever make. Thanks for the warning, Kinsey.

Next up on the moveable French feast that was  Calvin and Rosalie’s six-week stay with us was the Canal du Midi in Southern France. An engineering marvel of the 17th century, the Canal du Midi gets a little help from its main homie, the Canal de Garonne, to connect the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. Back in the day of old-school canals, this Two Kanal Krew was an extremely important shipping lane, saving trade vessels bucketloads of time and avoiding Spain altogether, all while “keeping it real” and maintaining impossibly high levels of street credibility – not easy to do when you’re a canal. Spain’s still ticked off about it to this day, referring to it as the “Canal du Hock-Ptoeey” and making little spitting gestures of disdain each time they have occasion to even speak its name. Spain is a wee bit thin-skinned on matters such as these. I think they’re still convinced everyone holds the Inquisition against them. Settle down, Spain.

These days, the Canal du Midi still lets you avoid Spain, though its not really one of its main selling points…not that it’s done much to pacify the cranky, fist-shaking Spaniards who line much of the canal’s length. I’m kidding. No, these days, the point of the Canal is leisurely idling, renting a canal boat and embarking on a lazy, self-catered cruise from Charming French Point A to Possibly Even More Charming French Point B. You can let go the anchor chain at cute, canal-side villages to pick up tasty local wine for the sipping and fresh local bread for the noshing. You can even tie off to the canal’s edge for 40 winks after tying one on with the aforementioned local delights. It’s the indulgent cruising dream, but on an intimate scale, with all the flexibility that being one’s own captain entails.

That’s the dream anyway. The reality, however, includes all of the tetchy details, right on up to the 5,000 hand-cranked locks you must pass through, the necessity of actually driving and docking the boat, and the constant discomfiting threat of the toilet giving up its groaning flush sounds and finally conking out altogether. But I do believe I’m getting ahead of myself.

meet the crack planning squad – planting decision trees since, like, forever

As with any adventure that includes multiple members of Kristanne’s family, we started out with a multi-layered, multi-threaded plan so baffling in its complexity that it would drive most full-grown adults to their knees, palms on their temples, crying out for a copy of Microsoft Project to handle it all. There were conditions and dependencies, checkpoints and milestones, decision trees and eventualities, and, of course, contingencies, failsafes, and backups. Somewhere, the Travelator was smiling.

To be fair, there were a lot of moving parts to this trip, with three separate groups of people coming together on the boat and heading off in different directions after the boat. At different times. To different countries. Here’s the lay of the land as we prepared to set sail:

• Calvin and Rosalie – The formidable in-laws from San Francisco, on the boat for the duration, a full week from Carnon to Colombiers with all points in between. Headed to Paris afterwards by way of rental car. Wearing matching lime-green jumpsuits with their names emblazoned on the back in rhinestones. I wish.
• Don and Liz – The salty veterans of previous Canal du Midi adventures, friends of Calvin and Rosalie from the US who were scheduled to meet us at the dock in Carnon before also heading out for the full week…maybe. Also headed to Paris afterwards by way of rental car, but a different rental car, from a different town, riding different roads. Dressed entirely in leather and featuring an artful arrangement of chains. Again, I wish.
• Quinn, Kinsey, Kristanne, and Sid – The wet-behind-the-ears crew of swabbies, only in it for the weekend. Headed back to Grenoble afterwards, followed by an abrupt sortie to the US for Sid immediately afterwards. Wearing event-appropriate faux sailor uniforms, complete with jaunty caps. Man, if only.

As you can see, this was all sort of like our own version of the Yalta Conference, though I don’t really feel comfortable assigning the Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin roles to the various parties. Let’s just say that I don’t have a mustache and I didn’t occupy Eastern Europe afterwards. That’s right – I’m looking at you, Don.

Our planning started with the cold realization that our faithful pack-mule here in France, the legendary Partner Tepee, only seats five people. Being the crack mathematicians that we are, we quickly ascertained that we had six people to fit into those five spaces, a calculus that could not hold. Faced with a crisis, the Crack Planning Squad of Rosalie, Calvin, and Kristanne vaulted into furious action and devised a clever strategy whereby I would be summarily dispatched on a bus, two trains, a bus, and a half-mile walk to get me from Grenoble to Valence to Montpellier to Carnon to the actual boat. Hmm. Apparently, the Crack Planning Squad didn’t much care for my earlier “patronizing attempts at being funny” and now had it in for me. Uh-oh.

between scylla, charybdis, and the etang de thau

When I finally trudged up to the waiting boat, the Crack Planning Squad made halfhearted attempts to conceal their surprise and dismay that I’d actually completed the arduous circuit they’d assigned me. “Oh, it’s you…,” they said in descending tones. “Err, I mean, hey, you’re finally here!” Do not tick off the Crack Planning Squad, man.

The boat was a furious hive of activity as we stockpiled enough supplies and luggage to sustain the Spanish Armada…not that they would ever deign to actually come to the very canal they so disdained. Once loaded, it was time for us to get the rundown on how to actually operate the boat. This was communicated half in English, half in French, and mostly in gestures like that one you see in the picture at right. Have I mentioned that I’m not very good at math?

This was right about the time where our rosy preconceptions about what our idyllic life on the boat would be like began to sag under the weight of a thousand dire warnings communicated along the lines of, “Never, never, never do <thing x>,” or “Whatever you do, make sure you never turn off <thing y>,” or, my personal favorite, “If you do <thing z>, the boat will sink and you will all perish before you can swim the 10 yards to shore.”

There was a daunting volume of instructions to absorb, with all manner of kitchen, plumbing, electrical, and navigational systems to be covered, with attention paid to topping off fresh water tanks when marina supply was available, attaching shore lines to keep deep cycle batteries charged, and a thorough review of a vast array of toggle switches and geegaws, all handily labeled with French acronyms. We all nodded confidently, with self-assured looks on our faces, secure in the knowledge that surely someone else in the group must know what the heck this jovial fellow was on about. “Piece of gâteau, mate!” we piped up merrily. “Hoist the mizzen and throw the sheets to the wind!”

The French guy chuckled nervously, checked again to make sure we had all signed the liability waivers, and proceeded with the directions to our destination. This didn’t seem like it could be too hard…after all, it was a canal, right? There was presumably only forward and back. Point ‘er down the canal, let ‘er rip, don’t take the turn that sails ‘er to the open sea, and let’s get ‘er done. Maybe we can even find some other situations where we can drop the leading “h” in “her” to imply our unerring can-do spirit and endearing folksiness. That’s why we speak ‘er like that.

Alas, this was where the last vestiges of our shiny boat-borne dream dissolved into so many petrifying rules, regulations, and predictions of imminent doom. “Always stay 10 meters from the banks. Yes, I’m aware the canal is only 15 meters wide. Find a way. Yield the right of way at crossing canals in the following manner. Be aware that crossing canals produce a cross-current that can generate unexpected navigational results. Never boat after sundown. Never drink white wine on an empty stomach or with red meat. Go with rosé instead – it’s much more versatile. Use the following approved marinas. Read the canalside signage as so. Operate the myriad locks in the following manner, with all hands on deck and everyone assigned a job. Lines are made fast using the following knots that I will now demonstrate at triple-speed. When you go under these bridges, you must lie down. Of course I’m serious. Yes, it’s completely normal.”

“The low-speed, hydraulic thrusters are incredibly useful for docking but cannot be used at speeds exceeding 2 knots. They will also unexpectedly fail after Day 1, necessitating a harborside stop for their repair. As recompense, you will enjoy the chance to demonstrate your skills in parallel parking a 35 foot boat without said incredibly useful hydraulic thrusters. There will be an appreciative French audience at hand, sipping the approved rosé. You will bump into things in the process, once again producing unexpected navigational result and possibly some cries of terror (your boat) and anger (other boats).”

“There are timed drawbridges here, here, and here. You must be at these drawbridges by this time or you will not be able to make it to the next marina before nightfall. Do not venture past this drawbridge and onto the Etang de Thau after nightfall. Do not attempt to cross the Etang de Thau without first phoning the harbormaster to verify that the current wind conditions are safe. Do not stray from the center of the Etang de Thau. Do not say the Etang de Thau’s name aloud while crossing the Etang de Thau – refer to instead as The Etang That Must Not Be Named or, if you are a Ted Nugent fan, Wango-Tango. Do not cross the Etang de Thau on an empty stomach, after/during drinking, or without the proper attire. No one under the age of 16 is allowed to drive the boat. No one under the age of 16 must know that the Etang de Thau even exists. I cannot tell you what the Etang is – you must face it alone. Okay, I’ll tell you – it’s like a giant, wind-tossed lake with protected shellfish farms on either side. This is why you must stay in the middle – to protect France’s oysters and mussels…and your lives.”

“At the far end of the Etang de Thau there is an exit onto the Canal du Midi that is 10 meters wide. You must locate this exit or you will beach the boat, requiring an expensive and embarrassing rescue. The exit is not signed. You must feel it. Think of this in the same way Luke did when successfully firing the needle-in-a-haystack photon torpedo that took down the Death Star, except Calvin is not Red Leader One and there is no Han Solo coming to your rescue. Yes, I’m aware that I’m stretching the Star Wars thing. No matter – you, too, must stretch out your feelings and use the force, or you will dwell in the Etang de Thau forever, a signpost to other would-be canal boaters who thought they could just up and get ‘er done. You may not get ‘er done. You may get ‘er sunk. Have a nice trip and we’ll see you in six days…maybe.”

Yeesh. Whatever happened to “Fair winds and following seas, mate!” or something cheery like that? We had apparently signed up for the canal boating equivalent of sailing around Cape Horn. The hardtack and grog better be good, because we were all coming home with scurvy and hooks for hands, for sure.

dude, it’s a canal, not the river styx

Suitably chastened and wearing identical “What the hell did we just get ourselves into?” looks, we fired up the hydraulic thrusters for what would prove to be the last time for several days, and eased out of our berth into the godforsaken, maritime hellhole that is the Canal du Midi.

Hmm. Wait a second. No slithery sea monsters or gap-mawed killer whales. No treacherous rip currents or cavernous whirlpools. No six foot seas and sleeper waves. Kids leisurely lounging in sun on deck, oblivious to any impending doom. Yo, Stalin and Churchill, let’s crack open that box of wine and pass the hors d’oeuvres…this ain’t half bad!

The anxiety we’d all been feeling after the grim tidings and ominous portent of our canal boat training began to recede in our wake. Who had time for that now? We were on a boat and the living was easy! With sun on our backs and wind in our hair, we pointed the boat down the canal, bound for the scenic medieval town of Aigues-Mortes (“Dead Eggs”…ok, ok: “Dead Waters”), where we would dock for the evening with plenty of time to partake of the local scenery and cuisine. The kids gamboled around the boat, the adults relaxed in deck chairs with glasses of wine, and Holy Horatio Hornblower, who’s driving the everloving boat?

Why, that would be none other than Rosalie, merrily weaving her carefree way from one side of the canal to the other, a delightfully s-shaped wake trailing behind her. With one hand on the wheel and the other on her wine, the nautical miles slipped behind us, much to the abject horror of shorebound onlookers. Or at least they did until a hastily-arranged mutiny took place, relieving Rosalie of her duties and confining her to her deck chair for the remainder of the proceedings. As a civil gesture, we did, however, allow her to keep her wine, which seemed to preserve some semblance of happiness, as you can see in the photo below.

Step away from the wheel, Ama.

With Rosalie banned from the pilot’s chair, who else was going to drive the boat? We needed someone with their wits about them, someone who was quick in a pinch, with reliable reflexes and a solid grasp of the maritime code. Someone who was neither Stalin, Churchill, nor Roosevelt, in other words. That’s right:

 have fun storming the castle!

With our navigational needs covered, we headed on to Aigues-Mortes, it’s stolid guard tower already appearing in the distance. Aigues-Mortes is a delightfully well-preserved medieval village in the Petite Camargue area of southern France, with fully-intact city walls and an old town full of narrow alleys that reward exploration. Adding to the sensation of timelessness was the abundance of passersby garbed in period costume and speaking in charmingly dated vernacular. (“By my troth, m’lady, I swear I shall crush his skull ere the cock crows!”) There were damsels in full gowns, knights in chainmail and plate armor, most of which was quite realistically dented, and every 100 meters or so, some of these guys were engaged in fantastic battle royales, complete with much hacking, thrusting, parrying, grunting, and bleeding…great gott im himmel, what the everloving hell is going on here?

As it turned out this frightfully realistic version of standard Renaissance Faire activities was actually the ‘World Championships’ of Medieval Combat. No, I’m not kidding, though I kinda wish I were. From the event brochure:

• “This week, the worlds of role-playing, live-action role-playing, cosplay and military re-enactment will collide in France at the first ever Battle of the Nations, a ‘world championship’ for medieval combat.”

I have no idea what the heck “cosplay” is, but it doesn’t like something your average, upstanding adult should be doing, now, does it? Now, throw in this little tidbit from a revelatory New York Times piece describing the event:

• The American team will be taking a support team of over 50 people, including a “psychologist specializing in head trauma, cooks, armorers, knight marshals, squires and a masseuse”.

So, in other words, we’d picked the one weekend out of the year when Aigues-Mortes was full of people for whom a standard Renaissance Faire wasn’t quite weird enough and who wanted to add to the verisimilitude by hacking one another with blunted medieval weapons.

This was going to be awesome!

First, however, we had to park the boat. The faithful hordes who’d come to cheer on the masters of medieval combat also seemed to have exhausted the available parking spots (“slips” or “berths” in boat talk, I’m told). And, with the hydraulic thrusters already having gone on their own version of the classic French grève (strike), we were also going to have to do our parking without the aid of any instantaneous right-to-left corrections, something that’s very nice to have when you’re not, say, the most veteran of boat handlers. After gently dissuading Rosalie’s careening attempts to grab the wheel and “park ‘er up,” as she said, our first attempt to back into an open spot was met with much screaming and arm-waving from a generously-lunged gent on the opposite side of the canal. We weren’t quite sure what he was on about, but he had an insistence that made him difficult to ignore. So, rather than listen to him yell at us for the duration of our stay, a task which he seemed perfectly capable of performing, we opted to demur on the spot and search up another.

And that’s when we saw ‘er….the mighty Led Zeppelin yacht. There she perched, queen of her slip, a testimony to one man’s love for all things Zep. This was a defiant statement of purpose, a physical manifestation of devotion to rock. And it was awesome.

The boat was covered stem to stern with intricate custom paintings depicting different aspects of the Led Zeppelin legend, including:

• The famous logos for each band member from the Zoso cover (Led Zeppelin IV, natch)
• The Hindenburg image from the Led Zeppelin I cover.
• The stylized “Led Zeppelin” font logo on the rear of the flying bridge.
• Mechanized scale models of the entire band performing the spacy part of the Whole Lotta Love jam, resin-coated, and permanently affixed to the flying bridge. Ok, not that one, but you have to admit, that would be pretty cool.
• The actual pièce de résistance (French for “piece of resistance”) was an imaginative depiction of what can only be the “Stairway to Heaven,” as seen below.

There’s a lady who’s sure…

Guess you knew where you were tying up for the night, eh?

So, yeah, there was no doubt where we were tying up for the night after we saw that bad-boy! We knew who we were partying with that night in Aigues-Mortes, for dang sure! And that’s when I remembered that I’m 45 years old, on a boat with my family, my in-laws, and another elderly couple and, frankly, should really be a bit more mature about the whole thing. “But dude!” my inner rocker said. “It’s the Zeppelin boat!”  And that’s when Kristanne tranquilized my inner rocker with a sharp crack to the skull with the Michelin Guide. Man. Hadn’t felt that in a while, but it still stings just like it used to. Point taken, Kristanne…point taken.

sitting on the dock of the bay, watching americans crash into it

There’s a definite trick to docking boats. I’ve watched it before, so I know it involves approaching at some sort of gentle angle and then violently slapping the transmission into reverse as you wildly spin the wheel in the opposite direction, allowing the stern of the boat to whack into the dock nudge into position. I mean, that’s one possible interpretation of it, anyway. The hydraulic thrusters make this task infinitely easier by firing out bursts of water from the sides of the boat that ease it this way or that without having to reverse the wheel and goose the engine. Alas, our hydraulic thrusters were still enjoying their little grève and were no doubt off sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes while sticking it to the man with “Power to the People” chants, even though they aren’t even people. Just like a socialist boat appliance, I tell you.

So, it was back to Plan B, with the violent spins and transmission clunkage. First up, we stationed the kids on deck with nets to recover any flotsam that might spontaneously eject during our little docking procedure, up to and including stray grandparents. Then, we stationed various people at various spots along the rail of the boat, each of them with wildly conflicting ideas about what to do and when to do it. To improve our chances of a successful landing, as we neared the dock, we each began shouting contradictory instructions to one another in increasingly panicky tones. This is known in behavioral psychology circles as the “more is more” approach, the idea being that if you have more sensory input during a time of heightened anxiety, you have more options from which to choose, and, hell, one of them might be right. To be fair, it doesn’t really matter that much, since because everyone is shouting, no one is listening, and the kids just sit there, nets at the ready, increasingly convinced that they’re going to be fishing their grandparents out of the drink at any moment.

At this point, our angle of approach was fixed. With about eight meters to go before we reached both the dock and the boat moored ahead of us, I threw the engine in reverse and spun the wheel. As for those on the guardrail, at least two threw various lines towards the dock, shoveling every rope they could find in that general direction. Even if the ropes had made it all the way to the dock, there was no one there to catch them, so it would have taken a rodeo quality toss to hit a cleat which, needless to say, we weren’t quite up to. Then, as the gap narrowed, two others in our party essayed dockwards leaps that might best be described as “ill-considered” given their advancing age, the still-considerable gap, and the possible consequences of, err, missing. For her part, Kristanne remained firmly entrenched above decks, adding her own feverish counsel to the general cacophony while simultaneously preparing the kids for the rescue efforts that were doubtless soon to follow. Purposefully grim looks firmly in place, the kids took off their hats and stripped down to their swimsuits.

I want cake now!

Unbelievably, our leapers somehow found dock instead of water and made quick work of securing the boat to the dock. Muffled applause, possibly ironic in nature, issued from the Led Zeppelin boat, filling my heart with pride. We did it! We really did it! The kids stood down from their Defcon 4 stance and changed out of their neoprene Farmer John wetsuits and back into shoreside clothes. Time for a leisurely exploration of Aigues-Mortes, hopefully with blunted broadswords in hand. There’s Stalin in that picture at left, providing us with his usual brand of gentle encouragement, no doubt saying something reassuring and supportive, such as “Come, let us sally forth and make the most of this cheery day!” or “I can’t wait to see this delightful French village!” or, perhaps, “Shake the lead out and hit the bricks so we can see how the French try to cheat us this time.” Stalin did not always have the most open-minded of stances for his travel, come to think of it. To be fair, I’m not sure one should expect much different from the guy who invented the Iron Curtain.

As it turned out, the leather-lunged fellow from across the canal turned out to be the harbormaster, a friendly fellow who charged us the nominal fee for our berth and set us on our way with a restaurant recommendation and his best wishes. Stalin, naturally, assumed that this was the French guy’s attempt at cheating us and we were suckers to have even given him the time of day, concluding the episode by attempting to push him into the canal. Good times. Good times. Calvin bailed us out of a potentially sticky situation with a quick, “Let’s git ‘er paid,” slapping our moorage fee in the feller’s nearly-offended hands and getting us on to Aigues-Mortes. Calvin had really asborbed the whole ‘er thing more readily than any of the rest of our crew.

a convenient time to point out that french people are actually really nice?

So, I don’t really know where it all got started, this rotten reputation the French have with, oh, the rest of the world as being snobby, supercilious, and peevish, but after a year here, I must say that it runs absolutely counter to nearly every experience we’ve had. Perhaps this stereotypical French attitude is something that’s more associated with Paris and the other major tourist destinations, where dealing with non-French-speaking visitors is a frequent occurrence, and ignorant buffoons in khaki shorts, golf shirts, and baseball caps clamber past the line in the local boulangerie and loudly declare that they’d like “one of them croy-sawnts, toot sweet”, finishing with an exhortation to “git ‘er baked”, irritating everyone in their presence in the process. Now, first off, I realize that stereotype is equally as reductive and ill-informed as those I described the rest of the world holding about the French and, secondly, I only did that, like, once. Also, I stopped wearing baseball caps here.

In all seriousness, it just boils down to the stuff you learned in kindergarten. Treat people with kindness and respect. It’s okay not to know the customs and language, but that all goes over so much better with others if they see you approaching situations with an open mind, a generous spirit, and a bit of warmth and humility. It doesn’t always work, but it definitely works better than arrogance and condescension and an assumption that all the people in a given country are conniving jerks who hate Americans and are actively trying to cheat you (unless you’re in Italy, where that last part is actually true, only they absolutely do not mean it personally and it’s really more of a sign of acceptance of you as part of their own…I think). We’re coming away from our year here with an amazement at how kind and helpful French people have been, here in Grenoble, there in Paris, and everywhere in between. Except for that one guy who stole my parking spot in the Carrefour lot. He can suck oeufs.

so is this, like, your new thing, wringing 6,000 words out of a weekend trip?

We had an enjoyable evening in Aigues-Mortes, dodging assaults from various medieval combatants, including our waitress, who was deadly with a rusty bottle cap…not to mention a rusty memory for what you ordered. Stalin insulted a few ice-cream vendors on the way home, and then it was bedtime…time for the eight of us to contort ourselves into our allotted .75 square meters of space and sail off to neverland in our dreams, secure in the knowledge that each of us would be waking up 15-20 times in the next six hours before we all gave up the charade and finally made some coffee. Aw, the idyllic pace and restful experience of the boating life.

For our family, all that was left was an uneventful return voyage to Carnon. There, a negotiator was hastily arranged to pacify the striking thrusters (turned out to be a hidden switch had been flipped in Stalin’s cabin…I suspect some sort of putsch, possibly the KGB), and the other four fellow travelers set out for the rest of their six day cruise, including the long-dreaded crossing of the Etang de Thau. Nothing is guaranteed on a canal boat, so as part of our farewells, we shed some tears, offered some benedictions, and sang a few rounds of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” before being advised that “that’s not helping, Sid.” Fair enough. For his part, Stalin assumed control of Poland.

in which the decision tree Begins to sag under its own weight, possibly crushing sid

The Crack Planning Squad (C.P.S.) was beginning to drive me to a newfound crack habit. Hey, I heard good things. The upshot this time was that I apparently had to fly to the US for a somewhat surreal four day business trip. Yes, it absolutely bears repeating – don’t tick the C.P.S. off. I was tasked with a late return flight Friday, after which I would meet the family in Geneva, and then drive out the next morning to meet the presumably-safe-from-the-Etang Calvin and Rosalie plus Stalin-and-Wife for a weekend of caves, Plus Beaux Villages, and questionable cuisine in the Ardeche. And crack. Lots of crack.

It was bizarre being in the US after 10 months away, but also quite boring since it was all for work, so I’m going to skip all of that and just show you the picture of my sweet “nesting suitcase” setup. On the way over, I paid the extra baggage fee and loaded two 50 pounders full of assorted bric-a-brac and whatchyahoosits that we no longer needed in G-Town but still wanted back in the States. I emptied both in Calvin & Rosalie’s condo in San Francisco (with their permission…I think) and then “nested” the two together to avoid the extra luggage fee on the way back. Into the suitcase went the few clothes I brought and some bare essentials from the US – refried beans and mac-n-cheese, natch. Genius, I tell you!

so, did calvin and rosalie survive the etang de thau?

Defying the Vegas odds and the epic rainstorms, we successfully managed to rendezvous with Calvin and Rosalie at the Aven d’Orgnac, an excellent cave site in the Ardèche countryside (pictured below). We’d already reserved rooms at a tidy auberge so it was just a matter of rolling up to the appointed location within the time window designated by the C.P.S., and we were good to go. This was all child’s-play for the C.P.S. and went off without a hitch, save for one detail. Where were Stalin-and-Wife?

As it turned out, the Etang de Thau was not without its victims. Though they’d safely made the crossing, successfully ascertaining that the wind conditions were favorable and making the needle in a haystack shot onto the Canal du Midi, the process had come at some cost to their collective sanity, and a certain amount of post-traumatic canal disorder had set in. This was no doubt exacerbated somewhat by the endless leaping on and off of the boat to negotiate locks and was probably sent careering over the ledge when the toilet broke. Ah, canal boats…so romantic. So, in the end, Stalin went AWOL, defecting with his wife on Day 4 and opting for the rental car to Paris, where he no doubt collectivized the peasants and possibly held a few purges. I am possibly carrying this comparison a tad too far. For their part, Rosalie and Calvin sailed heroically onwards, undeterred by balky thrusters, absent toilets, or direct orders from concerned harbormasters, successfully reaching their intended destination and at long last kneeling on terra firma once again.

dude, this is getting really long…can you, like, give me the digest version?

I totally agree, Mr. Snarky Headline Writer. Let’s move on to the Technical Writer’s faithful pal, ye olde bulleted list for a quick summary of our final weekend together with Calvin and Rosalie before they concluded their epic six-week stay and returned home to San Francisco. The C.P.S.had concocted a plan that set the Extreme Telecommuting throttle at “blur” for the next two days, including the following high points in the exceedingly gorgeous Ardèche département:

• Aven d’Orgnac. This gorgeous cave features a seductive pace, where you are slowly led down staircase after staircase, through antechamber after antechamber, until you finally arrive at the biggest chamber of all, except it’s completely in the dark. Then, the dance music cranks up, the lasers fire, and a DJ-worthy sound-and-light show takes place as the entire depth of the chamber is slowly revealed, leaving everyone feeling slightly woozy once it’s finished.

• A delicious meal at our auberge, complete with local wine, and a steak that is possibly illegal for an eight-year-old girl to order in most countries.

• A whopping THREE Plus Beaux Villages (Aigueze, Balazuc, and Vogüé), at least one of which featured a really creepy mannequin for sale at a community garage sale. Here’s a quick album of Plus Beauxdom for you. I’m a sucker for these charming, well-preserved country French villages with awesome food. Yeah, I know – I’m crazy like that. The kids, incidentally, do not quite share my affinity, dissolving into a frothing rage at the mere mention of the words “plus beaux.” They’ll thank me later, as other parents may have said at some other point in parenting history.

•  A preternaturally scenic drive through the absolutely sublime Gorges de l’Ardeche, as shown in the array of photos below. I hate to beat a dead horse – aw, who am I kidding…I  LOVE to beat dead horses! Kick sleeping dogs, too! – but France’s diversity of topography and richness of experience is nigh on mind-bending. Incidentally, I was roundly mocked during a recent car trip for using that “diversity of topography” construction in casual conversation with the kids yesterday, both by the kids and their – ahem – mother. That’s why I’m putting it here now. If you have any sleeping dogs or dead horses laying around, you might want to hide them. Take that, Crack Planning Squad!

• More speleological wonders, including La Grotte de la Madeleine and a museum for La Grotte Chauvet. The Madeleine cave was remarkable for its position on the canyon wall of the Ardeche river, as well as for the impressive performance put on by Calvin and Rosalie in their tireless ascent of hundreds of wet, steep stairs. Me, I just took the elevator. You can’t actually visit the Grotte Chauvet, but it’s incredibly interesting. Its entrance sits just 300 meters from a heavily visited tourist site (the Pont d’Arc natural stone bridge over the Ardèche River), yet it wasn’t discovered until December 18, 1994. It has an impressive array of prehistoric cave paintings that scientists believe date back 30,000 years ago, which is incidentally right around the time the first decision tree was planted. My geology is shaky, but I think this is informally known as the PainInTheAssic Period. The museum was well-done, but an even grander one is in the works, including recreations of the cave paintings. Werner Herzog, of all people, was able to film in the cave, and released Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 2010, documenting the discovery of the cave and the treasures within. Interesting stuff. Seriously! If that’s all too highbrow, here’s Quinn’s impression of a caveman from the Madeleine cave.

• The latest entry in my personal diary of odd French cuisine – caillette. At this point in the game, having been bitten by any number of tripe-wrapped sausages over the past several months, you’d think I’d go ahead and run Google Translate before ordering a local delicacy, no questions asked. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. On the plus side, not only was this delicious, but I’m pretty sure the name was mostly a euphemism, like “Elephant Ears” at the fair or “Sheep Testicles” in Montana. Let’s just go with that, eh?

 bringing it all back home

Too soon, the weekend was drawing to a close and our two roads diverged in a lovely Ardèche. Calvin and Rosalie had a leisurely drive ahead of them, full of Plus Beaux Villages (presumably sans enraged children) and French countryside hotels, before they would eventually arrive in Paris and head back to San Francisco. For our part, we had to get back to Grenoble. Why? Because the C.P.S.decreed that it must be so. Also, because that’s where we live and things like jobs and school occasionally intrude on our Gallic idyll.

We felt incredibly lucky to have as much time with Ama and Poppie as we did. We packed a whole lot of fun into their six weeks and can’t wait to see them again. Thanks for coming, Calvin and Rosalie!

With Calvin and Rosalie safely back in San Francisco, we began to cast an uneasy eye at our own French finish line, fast approaching at the end of July. We may have to put a momentary pause on the catch-up and talk about some of the things going on as we wind down our stay here…an experience for which the word “bittersweet” seems purpose-built.

See you next time…on the Odyssey!

 (road trip with the in-laws)

Catch-up time here on the Odyssey, as we attempt to process and distill the last – ahem – two months worth of hijinks into one neat package, suitable for rapid digestion, like a little Extreme Telecommuting power pellet.

I must warn you, however – things are about to get a bit addled heresabouts. Scattered, even. Today’s Odyssey forecast is calling for non-linear flows, unexplained narrative gaps, jarring transitions, and a face-melting pace, possibly not suitable for those with weak stomachs or a predisposition to vertigo. There’s also a strong chance of multiple forays into the downright nonsensical as we blaze a heroic swath through Italy and France with Kristanne’s parents, Calvin & Rosalie…who, frankly, should really have known better by now. More on that later. For now, lace ‘em up, strap ‘em on, and step into that not-at-all foreboding doorway there at the left – it’s time to hop on the Tilt-an-Odyssey with les beaux-parents!

hold on a cotton-picking second – what’s a “beaux-parent”?

“Beaux-parents” is French for “in-laws”, consisting of a belle-mère (beautiful mother/mother-in-law) and a beau-père (beautiful father/father-in-law).  The rumors and insinuations that Calvin & Rosalie invented these translations and somehow hornswoggled me into using them are entirely false, by the way. But really how would I, the hornswogglee, even know that? Hmm.

you say it’s your birthday?

One of the things we’ve tried to do during our year abroad is to make each of our birthdays an opportunity to do a little exploring. So, for example, for Kristanne’s birthday, we went to Italy for the Palio d’Asti, a bareback horse race around Asti’s town square contested by representatives of each of the town’s major neighborhoods, complete with festive parades, medieval pageantry, and some glacially-paced meals, the duration of which made us seriously question the premises of the “Slow Food” movement. How does anyone in Italy get anything done when most people appear to spend six hours a day in restaurants growing rakishly attractive facial stubble and waiting for their oft-rumored secondi piatti to arrive?

Note to Self — Probably a good idea to avoid sweeping cultural stereotypes like these. Makes me look kinda shallow and small-minded, even though it’s really fun and stuff.

The actual horse racing at the Palio summed to about 3 minutes of action over the course of three hours in the stands. The real action was listening to the official starter trying to cajole the panicky horses into a successful start with his silvery tongue and soothing tone. “Buoni-buoni-buoni...” he’d whisper over and over in lilting Italian, as he encouraged the courageous-yet-possibly-drunk bareback riders to ease their steeds into line. No doubt, this would have been exactly what those horses needed to calm themselves down, except our would-be horse whisperer was doing his whispering over a 10,000 decibel sound system with dubious origins in Brezhnev-era Soviet Russia and a penchant for feeding back massively at inopportune moments. Then, in response to the predictable false start that ensued, he’d react by angrily firing off what appeared to be a six-inch howitzer, sending everyone human and equine into a topping tizzy, none moreso than the emcee himself, who would indulge himself in an epic bout of top-notch Italian cursing, excoriating the riders, their families, and their presumed children living and as-yet-unborn for their equestrian transgressions, after which everyone seemed to feel much better and ready to try again with a fresh round of buoni-buoni-buonis and a reloaded cannon.

Quinn and I were up next on the Birthday Blitz, so as the end of October drew near, it was the perfect time to lay in parkas, mukluks, sealskin mittens, sterno-powered socks, and a portable diesel generator before heading off to Denmark, Norway, and northern Germany. Timing has never really been my strong suit.

Quinn wanted to hit the original Legoland in Billund, Denmark, for his birthday, so that was first up. It was their last week of the season, something they celebrated by sanding the streets of the Lego Driving School, sending a wee Lego icebreaking barge through the Lego Boat Ride, thawing the mechanized animals on the Lego Safari with a blowtorch, and dispatching crews with pickaxes to chip away at the burgeoning permafrost threatening to submerge Mini Land in an icy tomb.  We spent two days exploring the park by sled dog and were happy to make it out with only a mild case of frostbite from that one time I foolishly removed my hand from a glove long enough to eat a corndog. Sir Edmund Hilary, I ain’t.

what’d you do for your birthday? i mean, after you stopped your kvetching?

For my birthday, we decided to engage in a little competitive eating during our overnight crossing of the North Sea from Denmark to Bergen, Norway. The competition, in this case, was not of the traditional hot-dog gorging variety, but more of an endurance test, seeing who could last the longest at the “All the Pickled Fish You Can Eat Before You Yak…Suckah!” Captain’s Table buffet perched in the absolute prow of the lurching ship. Kristanne and the kids made it 10 minutes and I held on for 15 before we all headed back to the relative safety of our closet-sized cabin, tucked our gently moaning selves into bed and hung on until the morning, successfully staving off the last waves of impending nausea. Although not exactly Captains Courageous, we claimed this as a moral victory…Heatons 1, North Sea 0.

That’s a whole lot of back story to get you to our current predicament – Kinsey’s birthday! With the bar already set distressingly high with all these sundry forays into anniversaire awesomeness, we knew we really had to deliver the goods for our big girl’s eighth birthday. Could we somehow combine an Arctic amusement park with a seasick Scandinavian buffet, all punctuated by the odd blast of cannon-fire and cursing from our old buoni-buoni-buddy? Or, should we just cast our hard-won traditions to the winds and try to come up with something new?

It’s hard work recreating the magic of days gone by – just ask Britney Spears or the Tea Party – so we opted for an entirely new approach. Kinsey’s very favorite city in the whole world is Venice, Italy, so with the latest in a seemingly unending string of two-week French school holidays upon us, we lit out for the territory, Italian style.

In our case, “Italian style” translates to a rented Ford S-Max seven-seater stuffed full of in-laws, suitcases, and kids. It’s not exactly Dolce & Gabbana, but it works for us. And, to be fair, I did manage a few runway-quality heel turns as I flounced from gas station restrooms to driver’s seat and back again.

This is not at all meant to damn with faint praise, but one of the nicest things about living in the Rhone-Alpes region of France is how easy it is to get to Italy. Ninety minutes in the car (and 60 euros out of your pocketbook for the 13km/8.1m Frejus tunnel) takes you from G-Town (err, Grenoble) to Turin. That’s less time than it takes to drive from San Francisco to San Jose when the economy’s good and the SUVs are in bloom. Plus, when you get there, you’re not in, well, San Jose. Which is nice, too, though I do believe I possibly made some sort of resolution to eschew cheap shots at broad-brushed targets such as those. Whatever – it’s not like I wrote it down or anything.

when in Rome, do as the…wait – we didn’t go to rome

We started off with twelve days, a full tank of gas, and what turned out to be an optimistic sense of our ability to purchase Italian train tickets. More on that later. Let’s start with the “twelve days” part of the equation. We didn’t really know this before we set out on this adventure, but as it turns out, French kids go to school fewer days than any other industrialized nation. Now, before you break out your best French jokes about the 35-hour work week, Freedom Fries, and/or Jerry Lewis, let me hasten to add that they also go to school more hours than any industrialized nation.

“How,” you may ask, “how are they able to achieve this apparent contradiction in terms? Are they some sort of clever Gallic tricksters, playing cunning games with the very physical terms in which we experience time and space? Will they stop at nothing? What in the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are they playing at?”

Well, it’s actually quite a bit simpler than that, though I salute your faith in the time-bending powers of French philosophizing. Turns out, all they do is run the school day super-long (8:30-4:30), take tons of vacations, and don’t stop the school year until early July. Presto change-o, weirdo strange-o, as French philosophers actually rarely say. Oh, and they also take Wednesdays “off” which feels strange at first but ends up being a really nice break in the week. I put the “off” in quotation marks, because for French kids, being “off” means that you spend the day from dawn to way past dusk in a blurred frenzy of all manner of physical activity, stopping only long enough to wolf down fistfuls of chocolate, bread, and Haribo candies before going back for more. Being a French kid is a lot of work, though it also appears to be an awful lot of fun.

dude, it’s gonna take me longer to read about this trip than it took you to live it…

Duly noted, sarcastic headline-writing man. We’re gonna fire this bad boy up a little bit. Cinch up your harnesses. Also, pay no mind to what the neighbors might say when they espy you at the computer wearing a harness. They always suspected you were a bit off.

Our first stop was Genoa, mainly because I have a daughter who loves fish and they have what is reputed to be the “best aquarium in Europe,” though this appears to be one those lightly-considered and easily-bestowed honorifics that any tourist attraction with a website and an unimaginative approach to prospective slogans can throw at the wall and see if it sticks. Hmm. That seems unnecessarily bitter upon re-reading. What’d the Genoa Aquarium ever do to me? Geez. Lighten up, chief.

Putting aside this entertaining conversation between myself for the time being, I should point out that the Genoa Aquarium was actually quite nice, full of fish, as one tends to expect from their aquariums, and not at all a gridlocked mass of teeming humanity squinting at dimly illuminated pectoral fins as, perhaps, the Monaco Aquarium was, a bit later on in our itinerary. But I digress, mainly because, well, that’s what I do, even when I’ve expressly stated that I’m not.

the best exotic morali palace…

Genoa had much more than just its aquarium to sustain its touristical bona fides, including an old town with a tangled warren of pedestrian streets that made for entertaining exploring, numerous lavish palazzi, and pharmacists who, with some help from Kristanne, can diagnose and cure pinkeye in the time it takes me to order sandwiches for lunch. Long story. Let’s just focus on the handsome breakfast room at our hotel you see there, instead, shall we?  Best Italian breakfast by way of Bangalore that money can buy.

This was one of the stranger hotels we’ve stayed at. It was a good hotel, it was just…strange. As if someone had taken the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and plopped it down on two floors of a business building in downtown Genoa. The weirdness starts when you arrive at that door at right and it’s, just, locked. You have to buzz the owner, who buzzes you in and instructs you to ferry your goods and selves up to the fifth floor by using the two-person elevator in shifts.

Pay no mind to the nursery school on the first floor, the lawyer’s office on the second, or the seemingly random assortment of people coming and going from other floors. These are all normal hotel things. Also, never mind that the doors to the “hotel” floors are not locked and that your “room key” opens every other room in the “hotel.” These things are all “fine” and “not to be worried about.” Alright then. I’m reassured. I’m also assuming that I’m going to be dispossessed of all my worldly goods, but I’m reassured.

Once you get to your room, it’s time to marvel at the decor. There are murals on the walls, lavish golden headboards for the beds, and layers upon layers of ornate decorations everywhere one turns. An extremely kind Indian family owned and ran the hotel and they’d taken their own more-is-better design aesthetic and implemented it with Italian bric-a-brac. The result was a sort of surreal array of overcooked Italian decor brought to you by Bollywood. I give the Morali Palace an A for effort and would definitely stay there again, just for its pleasing oddness (and great location!).

like cristoforo colombo, i’m straight outta genoa…

There’s really no use for a car in Venice other than as a handy means to lure clusters of “independent parking assistants” looking to make a buck off you as you approach the Tronchetto parking garage, so we opted to just leave it in a parking garage in Genoa and take the train to Venice instead. Smart move, right? Showing our veteran savvy, you might even say? Indeed. Heck, we might even have preserved that reputation had we not managed to pay for the same train tickets three times in the next 72 hours, summarily erasing whatever Rick Stevesian street-cred we might have established over the course of this trip. If you’re wondering how something as awe-inspiringly numb-nutted as this can be accomplished, let me give you the 10 lira summary, even though there’s no such thing as a lira anymore:

1. Buy train tickets from Genoa to Venice but as two separate Internet transactions. Why? I can’t really remember. Let’s blame the website. Stupid website.
2. Fail to notice that the web form has reset the date from the first transaction so that the return tickets from Venice are now on the wrong date. Pay the non-refundable economy fare.
3. Display uncanny savvy on the ride from Genoa to Venice and notice that the return tickets for two of our travelers are on the wrong date. Overact resulting anguish in standard Italianate style with much wailing lament, impressive histrionics, and generalized angst. Earn respect and fear of fellow train passengers.
4. Purchase replacement tickets for return trip to Genoa upon arrival in Venice. Once again wisely choose the non-refundable economy rate. Fool me once, shame on me…fool me twice…and, well, it’s probably gonna be pretty easy to do that.
5. Enjoy Venice and all its many splendored charms, secure in the ironclad knowledge that the return tickets are safe in hand at a known, scheduled time.
6. Fail to realize that it’s someone other than you who knows that scheduled time.
7. Show up relaxed and sassy, ready to enjoy a pre-train cappuccino before heading back to Genoa.
8. 

   This is Italian for “…and I shall let no one buy the right train tickets…suckah!” Have I mentioned that I’m actually not very good at Italian?

   Suffer the slow dawning of the painful realization that you’re a complete numbskull and have already missed your train. Tuck tail between legs and purchase tickets…again. Wonder if anyone has ever before paid three times for the same two tickets from Venice back to Genoa.

9. Brazenly flout recent experience and purchase the economy fare again, displaying the solid logic of regular lottery players the world over by reasoning that, “Hey, the odds definitely gotta work out for us eventually.” Somehow get away with it and actually make it back to Genoa and our waiting car, resolutely whispering buoni-buoni-buoni to one another the whole time.

Train tickets? What train tickets?

So, for those of you keeping score at home, please just stop. I really don’t want to know. And if you’re wondering how we restrained ourselves from methodically bludgeoning one another over the head with guidebooks to restore our lost senses, well, let me just show you our failsafe technique in the accompanying picture.

Good call, Kristanne.

so, other than that, how was the opera, mrs. lincoln?

When you experience a little run of bad luck like this, it’s important to “let bygones be bygones” and “not throw good money after bad,” or, importantly, “stop being such a #$%# idiot.” So, we took those cheery saws to heart and still managed to enjoy Venice in between our train ticket arrival and train ticket departure fiascoes.

This, of course, is not a terribly difficult thing to do, what with it being Venice, and all. With its surpassing fame and occasionally crushing crowds of tourists, Venice can occasionally feel somewhat hackneyed and overdone. But there’s a reason for that – it’s an amazing place that deserves to be seen. Plus, you know, Kinsey really loves it!

My favorite thing to do is simply to walk around the myriad labyrinthine streets, just get lost and find new things as you do. It’s easy to do and always rewarding. The same technique works wonders if you find yourself overdosing on tourist traps and crowds – just walk away. Take a left turn. Take a right turn. Just get off the main roads to the major sites and you’ll soon find peace. Or see the world’s best dressed family fishing trip there in the accompanying photo. Man, that dashing tangerine v-neck sweater is not going to look good covered in fish scales. Actually, who am I kidding – that dude’s Italian. He could probably wear burlap and make it work.

Venice was three days of good food and fun, followed by an uneventful train ride the aforementioned complete clusterbungle of a return trip to Genoa. I’m putting it behind me now. Breathing easy. Happy spot and such. But, really, what the everloving hell?

maybe try the “breathing easy” thing again?

With Genoa receding in our rear-view mirror, we blazed up the coast to Nice and the Cote d’Azur, leaving our train woes safely behind us. Once we’d safely crossed the border back into France, Rosalie breathed a long sigh of relief and exclaimed, “I’m just glad that’s the last of our train travel for this trip. Trains are supposed to have terrible feng-shui this year.”
Now she tells us.

Our plan was to stay on the French Riviera for a luxurious six days, lounging by the pool in the Provencal sunshine, sniffing the lavender and nibbling on the simple, unpretentious cuisine. We’d rented a gorgeous farmhouse in the hills above Nice, which provided the double benefit of sweet digs and ample opportunities for me to make that, “Hey man, Nice house” joke that everyone loves so much and finds so clever, especially when I repeat it 15 times a day, chuckling gaily every time. God, I’m annoying.

We also planned to log plenty of beach time, taking advantage of the Cote d’Azur’s famous sunshine and ample coastline. Kinsey loves swimming more than just about anything, so the combination of good weather, a private pool, and easy access to miles of beach was just about an unbeatable birthday bonanza for her.

hmm…almost seems like you’re setting something up here…

It was an unbeatable birthday bonanza and it would have all been as-advertised, had we not run into the minor roadblock of endless unseasonable rain, pounding Mediterranean surf, and non-swimming temperatures. But did that stop us? Did we lay down and quit? Did we cry out in lament to the uncaring heavens, wailing, “Why, oh why, mon dieuuuu…whyyyyyyyyyy?”

Well, yeah. We kinda did. After all, we were still in our post-Italianate dramatic place and it was only natural to engage in a little bit of operatic bemoaning. Once we’d roamed the house with the requisite gnashing of teeth and beating of breast, though, it was more or less time to get on with it. So, Polly Get Your Parka On and let’s hit the beach. See how happy we look there in the picture? This is probably even better than it would have been with all that annoying sunshine and people in swimsuits enjoying the sunshine, and the sunshine possibly even giving us annoying sunburns.

Working for you? Feeling better? Yeah, it didn’t really do much for the kids, either, so I abandoned my standard Johnny Cheery-Pants routine in favor of busting out my surefire technique of a few dozen, “Wow, what a Nice beach!” jokes, confident that at last I’d found the key to restoring at least sunny dispositions in the absence of actual sunshine. Shockingly, that didn’t work at first, either. I say “at first” because it did eventually have the unforeseen side effect of unifying the rest of the family in a common cause – driving me into the sea under a hail of lobbed insults and pelted rocks. At this point, even the seagulls were fed up with the Nice jokes. Geez, buoni-buoni, y’all. Take a chill pill or something.

i scream, you scream, we all scream because we’re stuck in a minivan in Vieux nice

Clearly, I needed a way to get back in the good graces of the family. At this point, Rosalie’s transgression of conveniently forgetting the “bad feng shui for trains in 2013″ had been forgotten and her reputation completely rehabilitated. She was now as the driven snow; I had taken her spot as the convenient locus of ire, wrath, and scorn for all problems besetting us, real or imagined. My way out? Ice cream.

Turns out that the Vieille Ville (“Old Town”) of Nice boasts an extremely famous ice cream shop – Fenocchio. Would the family, perhaps, like to pay a visit and sample their wares? Would the family, perhaps, like to stop pelting me with flotsam and jetsam long enough to let me escape the sea and beat a hasty retreat to the vaunted Ford S-Max?

Success! I was granted a temporary stay of aggressions, a momentary ceasefire.  A full-on reprieve was conditional upon the delivery of the actual ice cream. With this charter in mind, we fired up the iPhone’s GPS maps and set a course for Old Town Nice.

Old Town districts in Europe are almost universally charming affairs, chock-a-block with attractive shop windows, interesting architecture, and oodles of tortuous, semi-pedestrian (if not outright pedestrian) alleys. I’m not going to call them “roads” or “streets” or even “lanes” because most of them are no wider than a gnat’s whiskers. And gnats don’t even have whiskers, unless they’re, like, radioactive gnats, and those don’t really exist outside of Incredible Hulk comic books. I do believe this qualifies as “digressing.”

There’s usually no way to drive in an Old Town, unless you’re on a scooter or bicycle or happen to have the codes that residents use to lower the various hydraulic bollards that prevent unauthorized access to different alleys. Besides, with the byzantine maze of one-way streets, dead-end streets, and pedestrian-only streets, you usually don’t want to be in a car anywhere near these districts. You usually want to park outside of them and walk in. In fact, you usually have to do this. There are entire middle-class French families living out of cars now permanently parked in Vieux Nice because their residents gave up on trying to find an exit sometime in the late ’70s. The 1870s.

How do I know this? Well, let’s just say that mistakes were made. Let’s just say that an honest attempt to follow our normally infallible iPhone’s suggestions ended in a near international incident. We turned into the Old Town. We turned into the Old Town and once you do that, well, you can’t turn back. The sea of humanity closes behind your car and seals you in, like those clever bushes in the maze of that one Harry Potter movie where he’s searching for the Tri-Wizard Cup, only to end up face to face with Lord Voldemort. Exactly like that. Except with more French people offering helpful advice on how to get the hell outta Vieille Dodge. And instead of meeting Lord Voldemort, well I ended up trying to speak French to a thoroughly unimpressed bollard. In retrospect, I think I might have preferred Voldemort. Perhaps I should explain.

You aren’t going to park anything larger than your own posterior anywhere in Vieux Nice. Once you’re in, you keep going until you’re out. Our iPhones showed an impressive ganglia of spindly alleys running this way and that, but with no information on any of the following:

• Which streets were one-way streets (Answer: All of them)
• Which streets were pedestrian-only streets (Answer: Most of them)
• Which streets were protected by those vexing hydraulic bollards (Answer: I can’t talk about it yet)
• Which streets allowed cars but were set up with bistro tables in such a way as to be impassable to the amply proportioned Ford S-Max without some abrupt meal interruptions for the good citizens of downtown Nice (Answer: Dude, many)

So, with these strategic limitations imposed on our efforts, we sallied forth as best we could by inching from one intersection to the next, brushing our way past the impassive and oblivious passersby. When we reached an intersection, we’d see which alleys were denied to us based on the presence of one-way streets, pedestrian-only streets, dead-end streets, or streets in use for religious services. This strategy not only severely limited our options, but it also got us very lost, very quickly. We did, however, see quite a lot of Vieux Nice that we might not have otherwise. So we had that going for us.

Then, salvation appeared. The iPhone showed what appeared to be a way out. Up that steep pedestrian hill to the church! Now hairpin down the other steep hill towards the sea! Watch out for that bicyclist, those babies, and that gentleman eating dinner in that cafe. Super! Let’s get out of here! Down, down, down, the hill we went, just as you see in the picture below.

Except when we got to the bottom of that hill it didn’t look like this picture, because this picture doesn’t show a construction truck blocking the road. And the exit. These guys were in the middle of excavating a large ditch and were not really interested in moving for me, despite my friendly suggestion that it would be really cool if they did. They suggested I talk to the bollard. This is not a cute expression or some sort of French euphemism for being told to pound sand. No. They wanted me to talk to the bollard. The one blocking the 90 degree turn to the left. So, I did. I talked to the bollard.

I approached cautiously. Never having talked to a bollard before, I wasn’t sure what to do. Did the normal rules of French conversational politesse apply? Was it a man or a woman bollard? Did I need to kiss it on the cheeks? If so, what constitutes bollard cheeks? As you can see, I had some issues here.

“Bonjour, monsieur bollard. Est-ce que je pourrais, err, passer, s’il vous plait?”
(“Hello, Mr. Bollard. Could I pass, please?”)

No response. I chanced a glance at the car where the adults of the family were continuing the Dead Silent Panic technique that had been working so well for all of us since our entry in to the Vieille Ville. Kristanne avoided eye contact, pretending that the iPhone’s map was good for something other than getting us more lost. Rosalie stared blankly ahead, her face a grim death mask behind sunglasses. For their part, the kids remained their calm, savvy, veteran selves – they’d seen way worse than this, plenty of times. Meanwhile, a lone bead of sweat traced an arduous furrow down Calvin’s forehead. “Oh crap,” that bead of sweat said. “He’s talking to the bollard. That can’t be good.”

Here’s Calvin’s rendition of the scene:

Then I looked at the construction workers. Those that weren’t doubled over in appreciative laughter were making exaggerated button-pushing gestures with their index fingers. Either that or this was the rude hand gesture that went with the instruction to “Talk To The Bollard.” Since I’d rather be helped than insulted, I chose the former interpretation, found a handy button to push on a post next to the bollard, and waited. After a few seconds, a voice boomed out over what appeared to be the same staticky, feedback-prone sound system used by our friends back at the Palio d’Asti:

“OUI, MRRRSHHHEAUX C’EST ZYYXIEUX BUNGA BUNGA PARCE QUEEGHHZZZ?”

Hmm. This was a puzzler. Based on context, I decided that “bunga bunga” probably meant “bollard.” However, I really didn’t want to get this wrong and have him fire off a cannon at me. So I quite reasonably stated that I would like there to be no more bunga bunga. Pas de bunga bunga, my friend!

“Oui? Je voudrais pas de bunga bunga, s’il vous plait!”

I also figured it wouldn’t hurt to point out that I was lost, clueless, and in need of assistance, so I added a little further identification:

“Je suis Americain!”

There! That oughta do the trick. I turned to flash a quick thumbs-up and a reassuring grin at both the construction workers and the S-Max. The former were now in various stages of hysterics; the latter were starting to assemble their backpacks for what they rightly assumed to be the inevitable trudge out of Vieux Nice and back to some sort of public transportation home.

“PAS DE PASSAGE, MONSIEUR! BOUGE, BOUGE, BOUGE!”
(“No passage, sir. Move, move, move!”)

That part was pretty unmistakable. That bollard wasn’t moving. Not only that, but Kristanne was pretty sure that even if it had moved, it was only going to gain us access to a far worse, far more inextricable situation. Time to consider our options. We were at the very bottom of a steep, one-way hill that was also a functional dead-end because of the giggly excavators. There was not room to turn around. There was not room to go forward or to the sides. We could call ‘er good, give it up and throw down the ole parking brake, join the other car-bound residents of Vieux Nice, but the S-Max just isn’t quite roomy enough for long-term housing for six people. That left just one option — going back up the hill in reverse, with a manual transmission, against the one-way traffic, between the babies, bicycles, and bistros, until we finally found someplace  to turn around. Gulp.

Where was Voldemort when I needed him? Geez, that is so like a fictional dark wizard, abandoning me in my time of need. Fortunately, the Ford S-Max comes with a daunting array of sonar buzzers, beepers, and bing-bings that are meant to alert you whenever some part of the car comes in proximity to some part of the world at large that it shouldn’t. A lot of cars in the US have this feature, but unless you live in the city, it’s kind of a pointless luxury. In Europe, where the streets are small (and the parking spots smaller), it comes in real handy more or less every day. So, up the hill we went, beeping and buzzing all the way, trying not to go too fast for safety and not so slow that I stalled the engine. Kristanne did her best to decipher whether the beeps and bings were false positives of people skirting our vehicle as we wrong-wayed our path up the grade or something we were actually going to hit and potentially destroy. At the very top of the hill, we backed around some group of irate soccer fans or a joyous wedding party or possibly just some squirrels (hey, I was under some stress here) before finally slapping it back into 1st gear and resuming our search for an exit, any exit at all, even if it was just a footpath to the wide-open vistas like those in the picture you see there.

This time, the one true path was on our side – after a few fits and starts, a patch of daylight revealed itself, blocked by yet another of those infernal bunga-bungas (err, bollards). Time to resume pleasantries, possibly re-establish negotiations? Or maybe if I just run into it, it’ll break off? How strong could it really be? It was only made out of military-grade metal, after all.

Fortunately for our insurance deductible, we were on the “safe” side of this bollard…all you had to do was drive up to it and it automatically retracted, giving you access to the world at large. Out! We were out! We stopped the car, did laps around it, high-fived strangers, knelt and kissed the grocery store parking lot, and returned the exhortations of the chortling excavators who paused their labor long enough to cheer our success. No more bunga-bunga for us, baby!

so did you ever get Your ice cream?

Thanks a lot, Mr. Buzzkill Headline Writer. No. We didn’t. But the family was so impressed with my successful extrication of the legendary Ford S-Max and its contents from Vieux Nice that they forgave me my previous transgressions and returned me to Persona Grata status. Quinn even started  leaping over random fountains, like that one at the Rothschild Gardens you see there at right. As for the rest of us, we headed back to our mountainside farmhouse to collect our bearings and wash down fistfuls of valium with great gulps of quality red wine. I’m kidding. Mostly.

There was more to Nice than just gorgeous coastline, crowded aquariums, charming Provencal villages, and delicious food, though. There were Matisse museums, Picasso museums, and Roman history museums. There was the Rothschild Mansion and Gardens, complete with a delightful lunch and tour for Rosalie’s birthday. And, of course, there was traffic. Lots and lots of traffic.

This is yet another facet of the French “tous ensemble” ethos, where everyone does everything together all the time. If it’s spring break, everyone’s at the beach for exactly the same hours, breaking for the same meal times at the same restaurants and then reconvening the next day to do it all over again. You combine this with stop lights that appear to have been timed by wicked gnomes crouching in potholes and cackling gleefully as you wait five minutes between each light cycle at each block in each square kilometer of the entire country and, well, it ain’t exactly easy getting from Point A to Point Vieille Ville, if you know what I mean. As an American, accustomed to more or less doing what I want when I want it regardless of what others are doing, this took some getting used to when we first arrived. After 10 months here, though, at this point I really do like it. Part of this is because I don’t exactly have a choice in the matter and not liking it would be sort of like choosing mewling insanity when Mr. Sanity was just right over there, wearing some stylish clothes and inviting you to sit down and have an aperitif with him, because, well, it’s 18h30 and it’s certainly too early for dinner. Let’s have a drink and chat a bit, eh? Seem civilized enough?

It does. It is. And it’s a big part of why French people don’t seem to experience marble loss at quite the same rate Americans do when confronted with crowds or lines or nonsensical waits at illogical and inefficient stoplights. They expect it. It’s just part of it and it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Especially if you managed to get some tasty ice cream from this awesome place in Vieux Nice before you got into whatever clusterjam you happen to be in.

but did you have a “nice” time…hahahaha! You’re right – that is fun!

Oh, it’s not over yet, Senor Snarky Headline Man. After six days in Nice, we still had to get back to Grenoble, facing that aforementioned traffic along the way. Our plan was to backroad it, taking the time to trace the contours of the Gorges du Verdon along the way. Also known as the “Grand Canyon of Europe” and possibly “That Big Hole in the Ground Over Yonder,” the Gorges du Verdon are not super well-known outside of France, but definitely deserve to be, as you can see for yourself in the picture below.

I’ll go on about this at ill-advised lengths in the next installment when we hit the Canal du Midi and the Ardeche, but the diversity of geography and geology (not to mention the cultural riches) packed into France is absolutely dizzying. Think about, for example, Texas, a state which doesn’t seem like it needs to be quite as big as it actually is to hold the things it does and compare it to France. Mainland France is smaller than the Lone Star State, but yet, well, it’s France, you know?

Now, before the Texans in the audience pull out their poison pens and proceed to light me up, let me hasten to add that I love Texas. I even lived there for a bit and there are plenty of amazing things there. Still, even its most ardent supporters have to admit that the vast swaths of nothingness that seem to constitute most West Texas don’t really need to be there. I mean, how many tumbleweeds and drive-through liquor stores do you really need?

Driving the Gorges of Verdon turned out to be a bit of a nailbiter. Not only were the roads narrow and perched precariously above the canyon, we also seemed to be sharing the road with all manner of different motorcycle and car clubs, which – suprise, surprise – appeared to be doing some group trips all together (tous ensemble forever, baby!).

The motorcyclists, especially, didn’t seem to have the sense of their own mortality that one typically expects from our two-wheeled brethren, exposed to the elements and motoring public at large as they are. Instead of, say, slowing down and riding single-file on the narrow roads skirting the canyon’s edge, their approach was to have the guy at the front of the pack flash his lights and wave his arms wildly whenever he passed a car, presumably so as to warn you that a bunch of motorcyclists were about to be riding way over the center line at speeds they could barely handle and doing it two or three abreast instead of single file. “With you in that totally exposed car like that,” their gestures seemed to say, “I strongly recommend that you slow down from that crazy 18mph you appear to be driving in that Ford S-Max, bro. It’s for your own safety.”

One group, in particular, stood out from the rest, mainly because they featured awe-inspiring multi-spiked helmets that made them appear as if their heads were either the business end of a medieval mace or a dandelion gone to seed – the Disciples of Chaos, as their leather jackets proudly declared. We saw their members so many times over the course of the drive that the kids would start pointing them out. There’s something inherently hilarious about an eight-year old girl excitedly exclaiming, “Look, Dad, it’s another Disciple of Chaos!” or a ten-year old boy wearily sighing, “Man, not the Disciples of Chaos again. Seems like we always see them.” Have I mentioned we’d been in the car a long time?

got any slightly off-color stories to illustrate that last bit?

The exact extent of our car-borne punchiness became more manifest as we eventually exited the Gorges du Verdon and started wending our way through a long river valley, making our way back to the major toll road that would speed us back to Grenoble. As luck would have it, this was the Asse River Valley, and, yes, that is how you pronounce it, thank you very much. The first town we came to had the following name:

Needless to say, this led to easily fifteen minutes of half-stifled guffaws, uncontrolled giggling, and plenty of tasteless jokes. There’s really no good way to pronounce that one, family sanity-wise. If you go for the French pronunciation and drop the “s” in the first word, well, it just sounds exactly like you’re saying “Broad Ass.” Yes, funny, I know. Stop it. Stop it now.

Now, you could also English it up and pronounce the “s”, but then it just sounds like the town is known for manufacturing ass support garments. Not good either. Again, stop it. Yes, I’m talking to you. The next town of “St. Julien d’Asse” didn’t help matters, for what it’s worth, nor did the repeated advertisements for a painting business named “Asscolor.” We had a carful of uncontrollable hysterics for the next 45 minutes, most of which, I hate to admit, came from Kristanne. Seriously. Only Rosalie, the former kindergarten teacher in our midst, managed a consistently stiff upper lip and a no-nonsense, that-is-neither-funny-nor-appropriate disposition. Still, next time, I think we’ll find a different route home.

The rest of the trip back to Grenoble passed in a blur, to the extent that eight hours in a car – even a natty Ford S-Max – can be termed a blur. We piled out of the car, peeled a few Disciples of Chaos off the hood, and headed back into the apartment, ready to plant our collective Broad Ass in a chair that wasn’t rolling. Phew.

what’s up next? And how long are calvin & Rosalie staying, anyway?

I had every intent of covering the rest of Calvin & Rosalie’s six-week stay with this entry, but with this bad boy topping 6700 words, I’m cutting if off here. Calvin & Rosalie are, after all, the parents of the Travelator — their pace produces results that cannot possibly be captured in a single entry. Plus, you know, they’re really fun and stuff.

So, next time out, we’ll take a relaxing boat ride on the Canal du Midi in a boat that practically steers itself and whose next mechanical problem will be its first, explore caves in the Ardeche that require the barest minimum of stair climbing, hit up a couple more Plus Beaux Villages, and maybe even eat some French food without fully understanding what the heck it is. All that and a yacht that is a floating testimony to one man’s love for Led Zeppelin. No, it’s not mine. Yet.

See you next time…on the Odyssey!