Bordeaux and Palmiers

Generally, when I travel, I go to cities, not small towns, for the pure reason that I don’t know how to drive a stick shift car, and am not old enough to rent one even if I did know how. On my first backpacking trip, we hit only large cities, and the only place we did stay that wasn’t a major metropolis, Mestre, was just outside of Venice with a bus.

When, on my second backpacking trip, my friends and I decided to visit the northeast of France, we chose a B and B in the small town of St. Marcan, an hour away from St. Malo. The B and B was called Au Bon Accueil, which literally translated means “of the good welcome” in French. It’s perhaps not as poetic in English, but no less true.

The B and B offered bikes for its guests to rent. Our first evening, we forwent this offer in favor of walking to a small crêpe restaurant nearby, where I learned that I’m allergic to buckwheat.

A few years before, just before my first backpacking trip across Europe, I’d had a mysterious reaction to something I ate in a Korean restaurant that sent me to the hospital for severe dosages of steroids. Since then, I’d always carried an Epi-Pen with me, just in case, but after three years, I’d grown lazy and didn’t carry it with me everywhere. One galette later and my friend Katie was running down the hill to the B and B to retrieve my Epi-Pen while my other friend, Emily, was hijacking a car (and its sixteen-year-old French driver) to take us to the nearest fire station. (Note: When in distress in France, call the pompiers (fire department). They’re the fastest to respond to a call, no matter what kind.)

All this to say that, when I finally returned from the hospital, the British couple who run the B and B were very gracious and welcoming. The lady drove us into the larger town to replace some things I lost (oh yeah… when Katie went to get the Epi-Pen, she brought the plastic bag that had all of my cosmetics in it, posed it atop the car, and the driver took off, scattering disposable razors and Advil all over the road.)

When we finally felt up to it, we took the owners up on their offer to rent bikes and did the 40 minute jaunt to Mont St. Michel. I had never seen it before, and it was quite lovely. The bike trip on the way there was a lot of fun, but on the way back, we rode headfirst into a rain storm. But when we got back to the B and B, the couple pointed us up to the pub up the road owned by their friend for a hot chicken curry and a beer… the perfect cure for a ride in the rain.

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