France at 200 kph - of Grandmothers, Lyon and Rain
In my teens, I traveled to France with my mother, father and
grandmother for a month of sightseeing with a rental car.
Michael Schumacher and Formula 1 have nothing on my father and
our Opel rental car.
American fathers have an interesting if somewhat aggravating
habit on trips. Yes, I am talking about the desire to see
everything there is to see. This was particularly problematic in
France, which has a gazillion things to see. For some reason, my
memory is a blur! I'll have to refer back to my Nomad Travel
Journal, but here we go...
Churches. Big churches. Small churches. Church ruins. New
churches. For three days, my grandmother had insisted we stop at
every church we passed. She is just about the greatest
grandmother a kid could hope for, but she had been a grade
school teacher for forty years and there is just no disobeying.
Did I mention we looked at churches?
We pulled into Lyon as the third day turned to evening. It was
raining. We were tired and grumpy. After a minor argument, we
pulled up in front of an older hotel with vacancies and checked
in. Family arrangements being what they were, my parents had one
room while my grandmother and I shared a second. We all agreed
to take a nap and meet a little later.
As I lay on my bed, I watched the rain come down hard on the
windows. I also admired the old, intricate wood structure that
was our hotel. I dozed off and was awaken a few hours later by
my grandmother.
"The door is stuck!" she told me.
Grumbling, I walked over to the door and gave it a yank. Then I
gave it another yank. Like a bad comedy, I put one leg up on the
wall and yanked again. Alas, the wood seemed to have swollen and
jammed the door shut. I couldn't budge it.
At this point, my grandmother made a passing comment about the
two years of French I was taking in high school and pointed to
the phone. Dutifully, I called down to the lobby and chaos
ensued. Somehow, we had lost the key, so I couldn't tell them
what room we were in. It just got worse.
What is the French word for "door?" Don't know? Neither did I
nor do I now. All I could say to the person at the front desk
is, "We are stuck!"
To top matters off, I also started yelling my last name, Chapo,
thinking they would at least come investigate. After being hung
up on twice, it occurred to me that the pronunciation of my last
name means "hat" in French. Yes, I was yelling,
"We are stuck! Hat!"
"We are stuck! Hat!"
Intensely cussing up a storm, I walked over to the door and
banged it with my fist. It bounced open. My grandmother and I
stared at each other and burst out laughing.
I hoofed it to my parent's room to tell them the story. Half way
through the tale, my mother plugged in her hair dryer, flipped
it on and blew out the electricity for the entire floor.
We left very early the next morning.