Dateline -- 29 July, 2009: Nice, France. We embarked on our adventure to Abeilhan, a very small hamlet in the the Languedoc region, with Honey leading the way to the train station.
A fairly uncomplicated journey (on paper), taking a train to Marseilles then connecting an hour later to a train headed for Beziers. Then a night's stay at Hotel de France in Beziers, where Mel would pick us up the next morning and take us to his home in Abeilhan. An easy, breezy journey to the Languedoc countryside for the summer.
Again, all of that was on paper. Spoiler alert: Not so much.
Honey got us to the station with plenty of time to spare, so we paused for cafe creme and croissants. I'm thinking now she planned it that way. And, yes, I have become one of those gay guys who sits at cafes feeding whatever he's eating to the small dog on his lap. Luckily, guys like me outnumber the guys who are not like me here in Nice.
Honey got sleepy after all that buttery good flakiness.
So much so, she flaked out on our first of two train rides.
The first leg was delayed, but the conductor assured us that our connecting train would be held. We arrived only 10 minutes late, but our connecting train was about to depart. Yikes! Vince and I pushed Honey, our baggage, and each other onto the first car we came to, then the doors clanked shut and the train skibbled down the tracks to Beziers.
Hot, sweaty, weary and cranky (me, anyway), we slunked through about a dozen cars to find our seats. Plush seats, in a first-class car. With a broken air conditioner. For two hours. Again, yikes!
At least we made the connection.
Grabbed a cab to the quaint Hotel de France, where the proprietress insisted we'd been there before. Perhaps we have doppelgangers running around in Southern France somewhere.
Anyhow, the owner was very kind and the room was charming. In fact, it was the perfect overnight pit stop after a hard day of travel. On paper. (Yes, another spoiler alert!)
The rate was a steal of a deal, Honey was welcome, and there was even free Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi that didn't really work. Exactly. Oh sure, I could get on the Web. But I couldn't get email. Or IM. Or a VPN connection to the client I was scheduled to work for that evening. Once again, yikes! Somehow, with all of those connectivity snafus, I was able to get on Skype to let my client know my predicament. Searched for an Internet cafe in town to and found precisely one. That was closing when I got there.
I would rather have missed our connecting train than end up going without a solid Internet connection for our brief stay in Beziers. It was the one connection that I truly needed. And I'm not even really a techno-geek. But sometimes digital nomads run into snags. Besides, tomorrow would be another day. And an easier one. Right?
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