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5 I Shutter To Think At Montbouy, near an old church, a small boy with a fishing rod angled in the canal. We ate our breakfast baguette by the water surrounded by flowers. Flowers occupied all spare plots of land. Pansies were a big hit. In mid town I went to an outdoor toilet with a view of distant hills. Those French knew how to live. I was weary. Sharon said I needed to eat more. We stopped at a bakery for high calorie fuel and I bought a pastry with what looked like pudding gushing out. It turned out to be constructed entirely from confectioner's sugar and was as hard as plaster of Paris. I went into my first grocery store and tried to buy a candle for our lantern. It took a while to explain what I wanted. I was ruing my inattention in French class. "Candle?" I asked the cashier and received a blank look. "Luminaire au paraffin?" I tried. At least I was creative. That utterance received a blanker look. Then I sang Happy Birthday and blew. "Ah, Oui, bougie!" she replied happily. That was it all right. Bougie. But they had only birthday cake ones. What was I going to do with thirty birthday candles? We cruised through the countryside when suddenly across the field were two huge nuclear plants. In Léré we slept beside a dark soccer field watching the station glow with eerie red illumination. The French used their shutters. They weren't purely for decoration. Sharon thought it was to hold heat in. It sure was private. Only a tiny crack of light emanated from within. We had to do a hundred kilometers per day to get to Lisbon to meet Susan and Vicky by the twentieth. Riding all day, all we had managed was a paltry seventyfive kilometers. Besides having short daylight hours to contend with it took us longer to eat, shop, find washrooms, and locate which road we wanted. |
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