We awoke on day 2 refreshed after sleeping off the long drive and looking forward to seeing places at a speed less than 120 km/hr. It should also be noted that day 1 was La Zino's first big test. In trying to find our campsite, we ended up in some of La Rochelle's narrowest streets, putting Bart's driving ability to the test. After packing up our urban campsite, we headed back into the narrow streets of La Rochelle's city center.
We split up with the girls going together and us manly men setting off in the other direction. The group bond was so strong that we ended up all back together within the next two hours, eating at a port side restaurant. Not only were the Crepes good, but our waitress was a cute little thing and we enjoyed Bart's (failed) attempts to flirt with her (Okay, maybe the girls were not so amused by this but it was pretty funny). After heading back to the car, it was time to show the beach bodies off. We made our way South down the coast to Saint Palais-sur-mer, where we (I) threw on our sexy Euro swim suits and showed off the goods (see picture).
On the beach, Bart, Aaron, and I had a mini World Cup shootout tournament. Battling through injury (cut foot on the rocks in the water) Aaron came in 3rd and I took Bart down in the finals using my man booty shorts as a distraction. In all honesty, the biggest victory for anyone was that nothing popped out of my suit during the action and post goal celebrations... With everyone a winner in that sense, we loaded La Zino up again in the direction of Bordeaux. After driving for a while, we pulled into (another strange) campsite an hour or two outside of Bordeaux and set up camp for the night.It was at this campsite that we added our 7th member to the crew, Eggbert. An eggplant that had a nose that Nomar would be proud of.
We got Eggbert liquored up to ease the pain of us eating his sister as a side dish to our pasta and after he passed out, we headed over to the game area to play some ping pong and foosball. While I played ping pong with this old guy from Madagascar, everyone else played Kikker (Dutch for Foosball). Drinks followed and before we knew it, July 6th was in the books.Day 3: Bordeaux...
My first near heart attack on the trip came in Bordeaux. We pulled into the underground parking lot with a clearance of 1.9 meters and everything looked fine until the top of our car scraped the roof. Pretty much trying to get our car through this garage was like Chris Farley's "fat guy in a little suit" antics in Tommy Boy. I'm pretty sure if La Zino wasn't loaded down with 6 people and all our camping stuff that we would have been stuck there for the rest of the trip, but as it was we made it with about a centimeter of space between us and the roof.
Joris led us on a walking tour of Bordeaux and we saw a lot of the city, but by far the best moment came at a free fine arts museum. We walked into the museum and although it was free, we still had to get tickets. The lady working asked us where we were from and gave the Belgians their tickets and let them go in. Completely straight faced, she turned to Aaron and I (the girls were outside still) and demanded $200 dollars entrance fee. A little perplexed we asked, "What?" $200 dollars for Americans she said again without cracking a smile. Still a little shocked and a little angry I asked, "Don't you think that is a little bit Racist?" to which the lady burst out laughing. We had been had but decided that we would have some fun with it too. When the girls came in, we hid around the corner and filmed them as the same joke was played on them. It was much funnier when you weren't the one being fooled and in hindsight it was pretty hilarious.
The rest of our day was spent touring around Bordeaux, taking pictures of cow statues that were placed around the city (yes we got a picture of us sucking the statues utter but it was on Aaron's camera... stay tuned for the saga of Aaron's camera later), walking on the popular water mirror, and of course stopping for ice cream. As the day began to wind down, we squeezed out of the parking garage and drove to Anderrlos le Bain where we watched Spain beat Germany and advance to the World Cup finals, setting the stage for Pamplona in a few days and one of the craziest 24 hour spans in my life. Day 3 was done-zo.
No comments:
Post a Comment