17th July 2010 – Stop

Kelsey wanted to get out and about. I might have been happy to spend my free time outside in the garden, or wandering, or simply sitting and drawing, reading, writing, talking or strumming the guitar or listening to music, but she wasn’t. She hatched a plan to walk to Lamastre, have a drink, and to walk back. I smiled: she clearly didn’t have a clue quite how long it would take to get to Lamastre on foot. My guess was at least three hours, given the hills. Add in a meagre hour for a drink, and we were looking at a seven hour long trip. I wasn’t too keen. We were debating this –in French, because we always spoke in French – when Michelle floated in and overheard us. She told us that if we didn’t want to walk all the way, we could always faire du stop. This – which I translated literally as to do the stop – turned out to be the very literal French way of saying to hitch-hike. 

As un-keen as I had been to walk all the way to Lamastre, I was even less keen to hitch-hike there. Hitch-hiking was dangerous. Hitch-hiking meant kidnap and rape and maybe death. But Kelsey was taken with the idea. It turned out that she had done it before in America and in France, and Michelle assured us that, because of the lack of public transport around those parts, it was quite common there.

So it was that a confident and experienced American set off down the drive with two nervous followers, six thumbs at the ready. It was only five minutes until Car Number One passed us. It pulled over a couple of metres further on, and its owners agreed to take us halfway to Lamastre. They were a middle-aged Parisian couple on holiday in Desaignes. They were wonderfully, emboldeningly normal, and when Goedele and I stepped down once more onto the road to Lamastre, it was with a much increased sense of our own chances of survival. We took to our thumbs once again. Car Number Two and Car Number Three drove past us as if we were ghosts, but Car Number Four stopped. A young couple bearing dreadlocks welcomed us into their back seats. They were in the region for a relaxing, tree-filled weekend away from office work, and while we jigsawed ourselves in between their luggage and a very old beige television set we set off once more towards our destination, discussing WWOOFing and jam with our new companions. 

Once in Lamastre, Kelsey realised why we hadn’t considered a six hour round journey worth our while. We wandered a little and sat down for a drink, as we had said we would. Goedele bought a sunhat from a nearby shop and we fooled around for a while, posing as cowboys on the steps of the town hall and reading the notices on the public noticeboard there. An orange flyer bore the bold title MARDI JAZZY. From that moment, Kelsey wanted to go. And I have to say that, despite wanting not to want to go on principal because she did, I really did want to go. An evening of funk and soul and saxophones? It sounded right up my street. Maybe Kelsey and I had more in common than I had thought after all. 

We had a few days to wait though, and we couldn’t very well stay in Lamastre town square until then. We began to debate how to hitchhike back to the farm in the middle of nowhere. It suddenly seemed a lot harder to get back than it had been to get to where we were. Anyone around here would know the way to Lamastre from the hills, but who would know where Fontsoleil was? As it happened it was easy, if a little hair-raising, because Car Number Five was driven by a local. Locals generally drove beat-up old cars, because in the hills with all the hairpin bends it was pointless to drive new ones. Besides, the old cars were easier to fix than the newfangled ones, and I doubted that the AA would have been happy to come that far out from civilisation. Locals also knew their ways around the myriad little hamlets and farms. Locals also drove far too fast, especially the men. Our local drove us off at the speed of light around rollercoaster bends, nearly writing off his stale-smoke-infused motor in the process. The prospect of near- certain death completely overrode the fear of kidnap. But in the end we arrived safely, if slightly kippered, at our destination. Not my transport of choice, perhaps, but I was to use it again. After all, we had a jazz concert to attend!