Je me suis trompée. Or something,

I should probably write this post in the optimist vein of "a good time or a good story," but it's really just the case that I had a miserable day. Perhaps, however, I will spin it in such a way that makes me not remember today as the day I broke down crying on a hill that wasn't a mountain, by a dam overlooking a very picturesque lake, and at a bus stop after two busses decided that we weren't people they should stop for. Or I could be brutally honest and just say that that's what happened.

I should've known that it wasn't looking like a good day. It took longer than it should've to get up and going, and, as we were almost at the point of leaving, things started to go awry.

If you've known me for more than a couple of hours and we have been travelling any distance on foot, you will know very well, that I'm not exactly the most coordinated of people. (This surprises a lot of people who also know that I've been dancing since I was 4. I've talked to a number of other lifelong dancers with similar problems.) Now, the first problem occurred at the combined faults of Jason and me. He had been weighing a couple of bottles of wine to see if they would go in his suitcase without pushing it over the weight limit, and was in the process of unpacking the bottles to fill his day pack with our lunch (baguette, cheese, and dried sausage; two bottles of water; mmmm). I turned around to get something off of my armoire shelf, didn't realize there were bottles on the floor, tripped, knocked them over, and watched in horror as one (fortunately only one) burst into pieces on my floor, flooding my room with wine. Now, while you might think a wine flood would be a fortunate thing to have, I'm not particularly fond of it on my things. Miraculously, it avoided all major items, getting my floor mat wet and staying predominately confined to a small puddle in the middle of my floor.

That slowed us down - floor towels and rags came out, glass shards went into the trash; eventually we got everything cleaned up. I'm still rather wary of walking barefoot in my room again. I'm telling you, it was an omen.

Eventually, we wandered down to the Rotonde and asked in the tourism office where we needed to go to climb the Mt. St. Victoire, our original plan for today. The man in the office gave us two sets of bus hours and instructions as to which stop to take, neither of which coordinated with the instructions that my assistant friend had given us yesterday. Trusting the man at the tourism office equally, we decided to take the bus that came the soonest, letting us off to hike up the north side of the mountain.

We had fifteen minutes or so before we needed to be waiting for the bus, so we went and got a crêpe at the crêpe shop in the underground passage way by the Rotonde. It was delicious.

We caught the bus around 12:15 and asked the driver to let us off at the stop that the man in the tourism office had indicated. When we got to a stop and the man told us it was ours, we dutifully descended. I'm pretty good at following directions.

Unfortunately, the stop where we got off the bus was in practically the middle of nowhere. There was a road off to the right, and, since there was nowhere else to go and no bus for another hour, we decided to just go that way. Now, the man at the tourism office had told us that there would be clearly marked hiking trails, but there were none. There were some cars that came by every now and then, but it was not a heavily trafficked road. After walking some distance, the St. Victoire came very clearly into view. It was MILES away with no clear access from where we were.

When I get lost, I get frustrated, and when I get frustrated, I cry. Jason is very optimistic and patient, and that's really fortunate. I texted my friend who had given us different instructions on how to get up the mountain, and he pretty much laughed at us for taking the bus we did. That didn't help. I sat down and cried while Jason wandered a ways off to see if there were trails nearby that went anywhere that seemed roughly like the mountain we were trying to climb. No dice. He did find a large lake that stood between us and the hill. This made me cry, too.

I was eventually coerced into wandering on down the trail, and boiling frustration brought tears out again when we actually got to the lake. I will admit, the view was beautiful. Once I get the photos off of Jason's camera, I'll put one up.

Frustrated, probably tired, and generally disgruntled, we decided that it would be best to go back to the bus stop and get on the bus home. The hours that we'd been given said there would be a bus in 15 minutes or so, so we sat, played sudoku on our phones, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After some time, we moved to a different bus stop slightly further down the road but on the other side of the street, thinking that a bus going past would be going in the right direction. Cars passed. Motorcycles passed. French people on bicycles passed. Three busses passed going in the other direction.

It wasn't until two busses in a row passed and, as we tried to signal to them that we wanted on board, wagged their fingers at us in a "I can't stop here" kind of way that I burst into tears again.

Shortly thereafter, we decided to walk down the road and see if we could find another bus stop, which we did. We decided to take the next bus going in whichever direction we could, and if we could, we'd see the little town of Vauvenargues and the chateau that Picasso owned for a while. It took some time, but a bus finally stopped for us. We did go to Vauvenargues - there's not much to see there; it takes about 10 minutes to walk the length of the town. There are pretty views of the mountains, though. Around 4:30, we got back on the bus and came home.

I took a nap and a shower and felt a lot better. Then we had pasta for dinner in town and hot chocolate and beer and live music and the company of friends at the bulldogge, and all of that was good.

What's it that Scarlett said? Tomorrow is another day?