Southern France – Nimes: Warmth, Air BnB escapades, travel

Yesterday we left Lille by rail. We had an 11am checkout and a 5pm train. We had found we can use Uber in France and not having to rely on taxis made things easier and cheaper. We Ubered our big old packs to the rail station and easily found a baggage storage locker. That gave us almost five hours to kill. No problem without our heavy packs. For once, I had planned and visualized to make this day go smoothly. Funny, those efforts seem to have worked.

Over the course of 6 days in Lille we finally began to understand how close our apartment was to 3 train stations and the Lille old town. We walked to old town and managed to use up 2 two hours partially by having coffee and hot chocolate in a cafe. In what we have seen of Europe, just about everything is smaller. This includes coffee, hot chocolate, rooms, cars, roads and beds.  Mostly we have seen small cars in Europe. In America big appears to be a status item. Here it is blase. A corollary to the car size disparity is the number of options for train and bus travel. Trains and buses run quite frequently and are well populated. The small cars seem more patient here than drivers in the U.S.

After coffee we walked back toward the rail station and had lunch, then sat in the welcoming sun of the warmest day we had experienced in France. Eventually, it was time to retrieve our luggage from storage. Five hours is a long time to wait, but we felt we did it well. On the train we had another 5 hours to spend without a focus to help time speed by. The scenery was predictable, green as it has been in all of our Europe train travels. One difference in France headed south on the train was it took about 3 hours of travel before we began to see farm animals. In the UK animals were omnipresent outside our train windows. Until we were about 90 minutes from Nimes the terrain was similar to what we had seen all the way from northern Scotland to more than halfway through France. At some point the hills began to roll more and eventually turned craggy mountainous foothills. We were helped to pass the time by a young French lady who talked to us for over an hour about France in general and specifically about France’s southern region where we were headed. We arrived in Nimes and easily solicited an Uber to our apartment.

The apartment was a disappointment with very cramped quarters, sheer curtains over a big first floor bedroom window with lights right outside of it, only a heavy comforter over the fitted sheet (in a warmer region than we had experienced so far), and big square sofa pillows for bed pillows. Before I even laid down to sleep, I was on the Air BnB site looking for a replacement room. Luckily, I only booked two nights in the unsatisfactory room where we both struggled mightily with sleep. Sheila had a massive headache before 3am.

Well, today is a new day and we moved to the “Frida Kahlo Cave”. We forfeited what we had paid for the second day in the bad apartment. A thing I dislike about Air BnB and Bokking.com is that you don’t know what you are getting until it is too late if you book extended stays. Refunds are like dinosaurs in the present environment. That is why I only booked 2 days in the initial unit.

I took a chance and booked 14 days at Frida Kahlo. I did this based on the Air BnB presentation, but also on gut feeling. Other than steep stairs to the bedroom Frida is wonderful and in a better location than apartment #one. It also has the best workspace for writing I have had since we left Spokane. I now feel situated and ready to explore Nimes and the surrounding areas for the next two weeks. One of the things I have learned while traveling is to plan ahead, so we will be working on what comes next very soon.

That’s it for tonight tomorrow promises to be interesting.