|
Mon Aug 6 2007: St. Tropez |
 |
I woke up bright and early, around 7:30AM to figure out what to do. I walked downstairs and the old lady was up in the kitchen. In my broken Grade 9 French, I enlisted her help in trying to contact the BMW dealership. She told me that was a bad idea, as it was so far away and that she knew a closer mechanic a couple of kms down the street. I was a bit hesitant, but she persisted so off I went, on a flat tire down the street (handlebars wobbling like crazy at 10 km/h) to visit the mechanic she knew. The large man who ran the garage/petrol station spoke no English at all, so again, with the Grade 9 French. I wish I had paid more attention in class back then! He went into his office and made a few phone calls and I poked around in his garage. He had a vintage Bentley he was working on, and some kind of cruiser in the back, so I felt a bit better that he was qualified to work on motorcycles. While he was on the phone, I called the BMW dealer that the GPS listed, but they said they were sales shop and that they would give me the number of a BMW repair centre. That's right when the SIM chip in my mobile phone ran out of money. *sigh* When the large mechanic guy came back he told me that in the whole of France, they had a shortage of the brand and type of tire I needed, so they were shipping one straight from Germany. We agreed on a price for him to mount the tire, and he informed me that shipping could be one or two days, so I was stuck here till Tuesday afternoon at the earliest, Wednesday evening at the latest. With my luck I'm betting Wed evening.
Paul, the mechanic that hopefully will help me get back on the road!
So leaving the bike in his garage, I walk the 2.1 km back to the hotel, which incidentally is a friggin' long walk! When I got to the hotel at 10:30AM, Neda told me the old lady had been on her case about leaving the room at 10AM. This is the start of the abrasion between the old lady and us. Neda went to try to book a room at a nicer hotel across the street, but they wanted a 3-night minimum, seeing as how everyone in Europe has August off, and this was the south of France, vacation destination for the whole of Europe. And two stranded Canadians. When I inquired at the tourist centre in town, they said almost all the hotels were booked in the area as well. So we're staying another night at Des Mimosas. *sigh*. Neda does laundry in the sink, puts the clothes out in the balcony to dry and we leave for the beach! Hey, when life hands you lemons, you sip lemonade under a parasol on a beach in the south of France. I could think of worst places to be stranded!
Pretty much what I did all afternoon
Beach at Canadel
They had a sand-castle building competition on the beach. I think this won first prize!
The weather is perfect for the beach. 30C, not humid at all, cloudless sky. I can see why a lot of Europeans come here for their vacation. It is very expensive though. The CAN to Euro exchange rate is 1.4:1, but the prices even in Euros are even high if you took did a 1:1 conversion. A bottle of San Pellegrino will set you back €4.50! That's $6.30 for a bottle of mineral water! Lunch was an exercise in trying to ignore math when looking at the prices on the menu. No wonder we didn't hear or see any North Americans in the area! We alternated between sleeping on a beachchair to jumping into the sea and sunning on a floating dock about 100m off the shore. So much fun! Packed it up around 5PM to take a shower back at the hotel and get ready for an evening out on the town! That's when the old lady berated us at leaving our laundry on the balcony since it's apparently quite gauche to waste water by using your sink to wash your clothes. We have to check out of here...
Where are we going tonight? St. Tropez! We've heard so much about it, but didn't really do any research as to what it was, or what to do when we got there. We just thought we'd head down and find out for ourselves. We doubled up on Neda's bike, and it was an eyeopener riding it on the twisty roads towards St. Tropez. About 5 kms outside of our hotel, we stopped at a larger town called Cavalaire-Sur-Mer and booked ourselves a nicer hotel to check into tomorrow morning. I'll stop by the mechanic's to see if the tire has come in, but I'm not too hopeful.
St. Tropez, by the docks
I'm not sure what we were expecting, but St. Tropez is more a beach town than a nightlife town. It's a picturesque, small town with most of the tourist activities near the docks. Very upscale fashion boutique stores with extravagant prices. Our favorite shopping activity yielded us a €8.50 fridge magnet. Unbelievable! We walked around town taking lots of pictures and timed our European appetites just right to coincide with finding a place to eat dinner around 9PM. It was a nice place called Restaurant de la Citadelle where Neda had excellent seafood. I had a steak. So much for the veggie diet!
Restaurant where we had dinner
  |
  |
 |
 |
Sign our Guestbook or send us E-mail: ride_dot@yahoo.ca |