June 13 // Mussels and Coke
What I’d like to know is why all of this is so hard. Waking up? What’s the deal with that? People are supposed to enjoy waking and living and walking and breathing, and yet.
This Hotel Richeleau, with its original parquet floors and marble-topped period furniture and windows that open and erratic shower heads and milk-skinned, Michele Gondry-ish owner, it was quite good to us for one night, and rising from bed wondering if perhaps I should have taken more magnesium to relax my sore gams or slathered more Chamois Butt’r on my tender Jessica Tandy, it’s difficult.
But rise we must, and rise we do. Or I do, anyway, tumbling out of the front door at some ungodly hour (9? 9:30??) in search of a goddamned pâtisserie. Is that too much to ask for? Even a rotten viennoiserie would do. That restaurant on the corner, L’Hovercraft, she is closed, and I can’t seem to find a Carrefour for the life of me, but after a few minutes of stumblation I do manage to land upon a crusty little boulangerie where it seems my modest clopinettes will be just enough to buy a twisty, buttery little viennoise au chocolat and a day-old ancient grain baguette. This was before the tariffs, you must understand.
Back in the room, Mark is all packed up and ready to go, and altogether disinterested in a bite of my loaf, so to speak, and with choc-butter dribbling down chin I snap into my morning packing panic, pacing back and forth from bathroom to bed and back wondering why I am so bad at finding the right place for anything. My doctor says it’s the ADHD, but it might just as well be the wine.
From the lobby it’s a long goodbye, as the beleaguered-but-invested Gondryesqueman kindly doles out advice on where we might go next. Have we booked a place to sleep for tonight? For tomorrow? Wouldn’t you like to know, Michel!
The prevailing Francigena route tells us to Wissant, while the EU-certified EuroVelo5 Route would have us tilting north toward Lilles, into Belgium, and onward through a total of seven different countries. For reasons I can’t recall that likely relate to my aversion toward exertion, we instead decide to shortcut southward along the fringe of the Regional Natural Park of the Caps and Marshes of Opale, riding right in line with the initial plan to cover 25 miles per day as Mark had previously assured me (presumably with his fingers crossed, but more on that later).
It’s a mildly leafy, largely industrial route, from the dewy Coulogne-Guîne Greenway along the ducky, open-faced Calais-Saint-Omer canal, and while there is the occasional biker or walker or even le big Mack truck that might face us down on the occasionally chalky road, our day is largely spent biking in parallel as Mark expertly drives the conversation with topics like “Marry F*ck Kill: Cartoon Edition” and “Marry F*ck Kill: Paul Giamatti Edition” (and yes, much like you, it seems I choose to F*ck Il Giamatti each and every time, Tom Waits and Betty Boop notwithstanding).
From Les Attaques to Les Pèlerins to Tournehem-sur-la-Hem, the farmer’s villages here sound considerably more interesting than they look, offering little in the way of shade from the burning sun which drapes itself over fields of young, spiky wheat and what appear to be tiny, dried-out green beans dangling from brassica stalks.
A shortcut through the town of Nordausques (not to be confused with Nortkerque, Zutkerque, or Éperlecques) brings us to the Cafe des Sports, a simple brasserie in red and white, presumably 19th century “brick gothic revival” architecture so common in the region that Mark intuits to be worth our lire.
Despite its modesty, the Cafe competes with Calais for title of Best Meal of Our Trip Thus Far: Mark, who is a big Coca-Cola Boy, gets the steak frites, which is quite fine. I, having biked at least a full hour inland, opt for a pot of moules marinière that are so pillowy and fresh they taste like piss. Good piss, though! It should be illegal to eat such fresh, delicious, pissy mussels, but here it is not only legal but also costs you money.
There is an English couple seated next to us who pretend not to listen in on our conversation and everyone else in the bar seems quite stern and looks quite gruff; the barman, a lone exception, photobombs us flippantly and the cashier, who has BOZO tattooed on his knuckles as if he were the star of a Charles Laughton film about a clown, does not seem to pick up on my very subtle irony when I ask him, “Veut dire que tu es un bozo?” His response: “no.”
From Nordausques to Houlle to Moulle, I decide it’s time that I take a turn leading the way, coaxing Mark to make a shortcut directly into a fat patch of poopmud. Though he abstains, I stubborn forge forward, and it soaks through my shoes and absolutely drenches my gears, wheels, and all of my belongings, much to my friend’s amusement. You can’t get diphtheria twice, right?
Spraying clumps hither and thither, the farmland and dirt roads soon give way to forest and highway, and however grateful I am for the shaded terraferma, I do not appreciate the lump I spy on the horizon where our lodging should be: we’re talking at least 100 feet of climbing, and after clopping my way upward, weighed down by shame and manure, I am officially ready for my nana.
The Abbaye Saint-Paul à Wisques is a certifiably majestic woodland compound that dates in part back to the late-15th century. We’re left waiting outside for nearly an hour with a young woman, who clearly wants no part of small talk with either of us, before a man (let’s call him Renaud) emerges in a stained jumpsuit with a wheelbarrow of weeds or something of the like.
After becoming fast friends, thanks to a combination of my charmingly idiotic French and a tendency to insult myself in a confusing fashion, I manage to offend him by calling him Renaud, presuming him to be merely a gardener. “Frère Renaud,” he corrects me. This is Benedictine territory, after all, making him both a friar and a gardener. Shit!
Having significantly expanded the property in 1895, monks like Frère Renaud were exiled to Belgium in 1901 after the anti-Catholic Law of Associations shuttered nearly 14,000 religious institutions en route to France’s formal separation of church and state in 1905. Allowed to return only in 1920, the Abbaye was again expanded significantly by an architect named Dom Bellot, leaving behind a very striking honeycomb motif in glass and ceramic tile and a courtyard which I immediately soil with my bike.
At the entrance, an ancient monk in a fluffy white beard greets us from behind a window: his Benedictine duties, it seems, is processing our (suggested) donations, which is great because he appears to be all but blind and immobile. Unaccustomed to electricity, the monk is unable to process Mark’s credit card; Mark, unaccustomed to cash, opts not to pay for his stay.
You busted, Mark! Jesus is reading this.
From there, Frère Renaud then ushers us into a small chapel, where he says a prayer on our behalf – awwwkward – then shows us to our individual rooms with a view overlooking the valley that seems just impossibly, eye-searingly green.
In the communal bathroom, a shirtless octogenarian monk farts loudly, leaving behind a stench that one would typically associate with zombies; the shower is overcome with spiders which are far too large, far too colorful, far too stripey and far too rude: in my country, if a spider insists on sharing a shower, it at least makes an attempt not to to look at my Lady Schnauzerling. But that’s France for you, I guess: even the spiders want to swing.
We’re instructed to head to the dining hall at 7pm on the dot, and it’s there where we are greeted in silence by the Grand Frère, an Estelle Getty-sized man who takes pours a pitcher of water over our hands and into a bowl in some germ-friendly approximation of washing up. Mark, who is an expert at such delicate matters, manages to deflect a stream of water directly down the front of the Big Brother’s robe, then laughs at a volume unbecoming of those who are supposed to be silent.
We Do Not Belong Here.
In this vast, modernist, Harry Potter-like hall, we are seated at a long, communal table alongside a young Irish zealot and a middle-aged Polish zealot, both of whom are far kinder and less judgmental than I. Big Brother sits at the head of the room, attended to by his aides, while Frère Renaud, now in his formal robes, hovers over us from a dais where he incants passages in Latin from what I assume is the Bible? Some monks serve us our meal: potage de Crécy (AKA carrot soup), cold macaroni salad, bread, red wine, and water, each served and retracted at a pace that has our head spinning. Before we’ve had half of our wine or finished our bread, one or another monk has taken our plates back with them to the kitchen and Frère Renaud has completed his recitations and his colleagues have finished their chanting in response.
As someone who once scooped brains out of an undercooked pig head I personally decapitated and spent a childhood in Chuck-E-Cheese, I can confidently say that it was the weirdest meal of my life.
Now: it’s 8pm and the sun is still out, but we’re in the middle of the forest and locked in from the outside, so with no Internet, no books, and nothing better to do, we return to our respective rooms and go to sleep.
And that’s the end of this entry. So much fun.