Travel is the agony and the ecstasy. It's a series of small defeats and great victories. It is not particularly relaxing or especially easy. A vacation can be easy. Going to the beach and not doing anything for a week except reading a book (Ed. Note: I have NEVER seen anyone reading a book on a beach) might be relaxing but wading out into the unknown is unknowable.
LWSJ, describing a backpacking trip to Europe: "It was a grind."
I get that. Unforgettable, not to be missed, but a grind.
We were wearing down as our time in France grew short and could see our patience ebbing away, fading away, dissipating like mist in the sun. Our hosts, unresponsive to the simplest question without repeated proddings, then offering confusing answers, weren't helping at all. On our last day there we took a drive to a little town which was a little town that had absolutely nothing noteworthy to see, so we retraced our steps (Steps, steps, steps, I seem to vaguely remember something about steps . . . ) to Les Baux.
We should never retrace our steps. We wandered about disconsolately until we decided to have a rejuvenating coffee, stopping for a cup of take-away at an open window into what appeared to be a shop that offered take-away coffee. At least there was a guy standing patiently by an espresso machine. I ordered - in French, mind you - two coffees. The woman womaning the window conferred with the man by the machine and waved us off. No. Sorry.
Who knows what the deal was. Maybe the machine was broken or they were out of coffee or it was lunch time - not coffee time. Both SuperK and I took this rejection personally and because we were a few days too long at one spot we temporarily allowed it to color our whole stay there.
This is why I try to be nice as much as I can - one can never tell when the simplest of actions can be misconstrued and affect someone else in an outsized fashion. You want to merge in front of me? Yessir, go right ahead.
It's the little actions that matter. It really IS the little stuff.
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