On the road again,..again

Route: Veules-les-Roses to Cayeux-sur-Mer via Dieppe. Distance about 90 km

I’m feeling a lot better today the headwind has subsided a little bit. It’s still there, but not as strong. I am finding that I am past the hump of not wanting to ride anymore. I think I had to go through it. Everyone does go through something like this in whatever they try. Mine was (hopefully) yesterday when I just couldn’t ride anymore into that wind. All I wanted to do was get off the bike and get onto a train. I really just needed sleep and a new outlook.
I happened upon a wonderful little artspace/coffee shop in Verengevill Sur-Mer. The woman who runs the place, of course, speaks no English, but I think I’m starting to think in broken French anyway. I walked in and asked if they had the internet. There was a brief second of pause then she smiled and said “oue, le toiletts?” To which, because it sounded like the French pronunciation of internet, I replied “Oue! I was very excited to get my postings off early for the day.
Of course, she mean toilet, which I also needed, so it was a 50/50 win I guess. Also, this small misunderstanding gave me a chance to enjoy a very expensive, yet needed cup of coffee. I’m starting to let go, albeit not voluntarily, of my American need for instant gratification. The French attitude is laid back on purpose. Some things are worth waiting for. While this is a lot easier for me to understand after I’ve had coffee, I do dig it.
They generally get up early, 6 or 7am, eat a small breakfast and are at work by 9. Around noon, they close up (and I mean everything closes) until 3pm and work till around 7. Some places still close at five of course, but they generally don’t take work too seriously. Perhaps this is why so many French people live to be 100.
I was generally sticking to the coastal roads, not trying to get onto the main highway too much due to traffic and bad wind conditions, but the problem with that is that every little town starts to get repetitive. I would be riding along into minor headwind making around 14 kph. A sign would come up, and announce that it’s 1km to (fill in the blank –sur-Mer), shortly followed by a bittersweet downhill into a wonderfully picturesque little French fishing village.
Usually there is at least a well maintained but ancient stone church, sometimes a medieval castle and it’s always nestled in a little draw created by a river valley which empties into the English Channel. I would pedal through it in a flash because the draw protects the town from the ever present winds, and then have to climb back up onto the bench land above on the other side. Then there is a steep uphill into the wind, and onto the next town in 3km or so where I repeat the whole process. It’s so strange to think of something like a McDonalds as being an oddity given this sameness.
Each one of these little towns has existed since the time of the Romans. There are little reminders of this in the stone quays which lead into each port from the sea. They are ancient, and probably the most well-preserves pieces of architecture in the area in terms of age and lifespan. Since each of these towns is traditionally a fishing and trading town, these were their lifeblood and there are monuments on each one at various points highlighting certain rulers or rich nobles who made contributions to their upkeep over the centuries. I have little doubt that if Marcus Aurelius, were he with us today, would recognize some portion of these stone edifices.
The other comment about these coastal towns is that, barring one or two areas which cater to tourists, they are rough. As soon as you stray off the beaten path, you get into a no mans land of drunk sailors, drug dealers, prostitutes and little punks kids riding motorbikes. It’s really on recently say since about 1860, that these towns have been considered tourist destinations.
Of course, I’m way off of Grandpa’s track. As a replacement officer coming into the ETO he would have been assigned to a replacement depot, called a repple depple, somewhere in France, most likely around Caen. This was a huge staging area for the allies for the duration of the war after its capture from the Nazi’s in August 1944.
Usually what happened at a Repple Depple was you sat and waited while putting up with various degrees of military discipline, called at the time chickenshit. Waking toa bugal call at 0500 everyday, followed by constant drills and physical training. Along with this still came a lot of just sitting around waiting to be assigned to a unit. A dull and tedious process that was distained by almost everyone involved.
It was at encampments like these that some of the more unsavory and lesser known acts of robbery took place during the war. It’s estimated that fully 30% of US Army supplies sent to the ETO never reached the front. This explains Grandpa’s repeated requests in his letter for cigarettes and food. He wasn’t crazy a lot of rear echelon people were “finding” things that fell off the truck and selling them in Paris which had grown into a huge black market for everything from chewing gum to heroin. When you remember that toilet paper was rationed by the War Department, it makes sense that every little item would inflate in value.
But of course, this wasn’t the whole story. These places were also filled with mostly good guys trying to get used to the fact that a lot of them were going to go into combat shortly. The war in late 1944, despite the opinion of the top brass and the press, was not ending anytime soon. These men were going to be fighting, and soon.
In a way, I feel like I’m sitting in one of these camps right now. My humble abode for the night is the French equivalent of a white trash trailer park. Next to me are little pop trailers that have obviously not moved in ages because they have been mowed around so many times that the earth has built a mini hedgerow under the faded sides of each unit. The tires are flat, and the windows have rusted onto the finishes.
I too am waiting. Waiting to get out of France, and into Holland where the combat part of the story took place. Like Grandpa, I’m sitting around waiting for my walking papers. Instead of time, I have miles of French coast to sweat through. Instead of combat, I have at least a month of living in a tent in all kinds of conditions. Instead of friends he made at the camp, I have the few people I’ve interacted with along the way.
The couple who runs this fine establishment at first seemed very nice, then all of a sudden not so nice when they looked at my passport. “Ahhhh..Americane”, awkward pause, “oue”.
I tried my best broken French. “Pardon Madam, petit Francais. Une komping, Une Jeix, avet L’eltricite, cei vou plei?” She smiled, and her husband yawned and rolled his eyes. “It’s ok, one spot with electricity right?” She replied in English. “Right, thank you, I’m sorry I don’t speak much French.” I said.
“Oue” was all she said. Merely an acknowledgement of fact.
After we had finished the paperwork, and her husband led me to a crappy campsite in full view of the parking lot next to the toilets and without power, I asked for another site, with power. When he led me to one with power, he had forgotten the keys to open the utility box. I said ok when he indicated that I was to wait and he would get the keys. I waited, and waited. I got out my maps and did some planning. I was about to walk over to the booth when he showed up with a set of keys, unlocked the cover and left saying “viola” over his shoulder as he walked to a neighbor a couple of trailers down and starting talking.
Soon it became apparent that I needed an RV adaptor to make my computer plug fit the plug on the outlet. I politely walked over to the two men talking, and the guy turned to me and said a bunch of things in French that I don’t understand, but none of good. I asked politely for a power adapter. He told me that he would get one from the office and went right back talking to his friend, loudly mentioning the word “American” while scoffing.
While I was pitching my tent and getting my stuff ready to take a shower, I could overhear both of them telling their favorite rude American stories. The word “American” repeated over and over again in ever louder and ruder tones. As far as I was concerned, I had done nothing but ask for what they said they could provide me when I signed the papers in the office, and in an overly polite and respectful manner. If I was back home right now, I probably would have been yelling at someone.
I took a walk to the showers cursing France under my breath and generally not feeling good about being here. This of course sucks because I’m supposed to be having fun. But is it really a fun when you have to keep reminding yourself that it is? I’ve tried so many times to be polite and speak what little French I can. The problem of course isn’t that I don’t know French, it’s that I wasn’t born French.
With the hot water of the shower washing away the day’s travels, all the hills, headwinds and general lack of progress went away and I began to think about how I could have approached that situation differently. When I had finished, I walked to the office and asked for the adaptor that I knew the guy wasn’t going to bring over. He was hanging out with three of his buddies and didn’t acknowledge my presence. I asked his wife, and she very nicely provided me with the adaptor. I began to sense that the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t French, the problem was in fact that this guy was a dick.
While walking back to my tent, I passed the elderly neighbor to whom Captain Dickface had been talking earlier. I made a peace offering my smiling and saying “Bonsiour”. He smiled at me as I walked past. Five minutes later, as I was struggling to get my dinner laid out on the ground in front of the ten, he showed up at my site with a folding table and a lawn chair. In a jovial manner, he indicated to me that camping and eating on the ground was not civilized. I was to return it in the morning, and if I didn’t, he would beat me up!
He was around 80 and hefted out his arms and chest in a fake muscleman pose while smiling. I laughed and said thank you many times. I think he felt bad about what had happened earlier. Every time I’m ready to give up on this country, something like this happens and I realize that it’s no worse than the US. Can you imagine what some redneck would do to a purse carrying French fop if he showed up to go camping in Wyoming?
One point of interest along the way today was the city of Dieppe. In the World War Two “nerd alert” that I constantly live in, Dieppe is famous because it was the target of a poorly planned and executed raid by the British in 1942. They landed with several battalions of Canadian troops at Puys, a little town just to the north of the city. The port of Dieppe itself was heavily fortified, and most of these bunkers are still there in some form or another. The entire work is a Hollywood set designer’s dream. Imagine an entire cliff face carved out, made into machine gun nests, artillery ports, and listening posts, then recovered in concrete and formed to match the natural finish so well that you can’t tell until you are literally standing next to it. The budget must have been gigantic because these types of forts are in every port and minor town all way from Normandy to here.
The one at Dieppe, however, proved to be too much for the Canadians who were doomed from the beginning because of the “limited” nature of the assault. Basically that meant that they would be given little to no tank support. This factor, plus the still very strong German Air Force, decided the day and the whole effort resulted in ______killed or wounded and a massive evacuation/abandonment of forces on the coast, a major German victory for the press, Oh, and Dieppe got on the map.
Coincidently, there was a huge air battle over the city during the assault. Estimates of over 1000 aircraft dog-fighting that day after the landing have been posited. This could very well be accurate. It’s known as the biggest daylight dogfight in the ETO.
Something I forgot to mention yesterday was that I came across an old US fighter airfield and ate lunch on the runway. The cracked cement still contained its letters, and the tower still stood at one end. To be fair, it is still used as a General Aviation field, but the runway isn’t. There is a lone British Vampire jet fighter sitting in repose next to a snack shop under the tower. It was the first jet the allies managed to get into the air in 1943. It ended up being inferior to the German ME 262, and was basically abandoned as a design after the war, but it probably operated, along side American planes, out of this field. I could almost see the P-51’s lining up on final and flaring out over the runway while returning from a mission over Germany.
Of note was the youngish looking French dude preflighting a low wing Grumman trainer aircraft while sporting a black bandana and full trench coat. He looked like he was trying to be some sort of flying Zoro. He nodded and looked at me curiously as I circled his plane on my bike. “Je Pilote”, I said to him trying to spark some sort of “I love flying too” discussion. This would ultimately culminate in him letting me ride right seat on his flight today. He nodded and looked at me quizzically not unlike a cat when disturbed some lesser animal like a human. I left.
Well, that’s about it for today folks. I will be in Holland in three more days if I can keep up 90-100 km a day. If all goes well, I’ll be out of France by Sunday. Everything is closed here on Sunday anyway.
Peace.