Reading those travel tales got me reminiscing. So, here we go with an early tale, have yourself a read ðĪ.
This goes right back to July 1980, when me and my mate had just turned 18 and just about finishing 6th form. We took ourselves off on a trip to Chamonix by train, which was inspired by our Art teacher, known as captain McFrizz. We went with a vague intention of having a go, at least in part at the Mont Blanc circular trek. On our way there we stopped off at a couple of places, non-better than Annecy which was an absolutely beautiful old town built amongst canals and situated next to the cleanest most fantastically scenic lake imaginable. It was a stunning place and at that time seemingly untouched by the Brits other than perhaps Frank and Nestor Bough on their French tours for the BBC Holiday program.
I remember as we walked from the station, with our back packs along the streets of the old town up to the campsite and we met a bunch of game lasses from St Etienne. They were gorgeous, they each had long curly brown/black hair with a reddish tint in and amongst and they were skinny as rakes, skinny legs. Infact, that’s why I though the French were called frogs due to their skinny froggy legs like these girls had. It’s a shame though to think how things have changed, with the takeover from MacDonalds and the discovery of chips in France they are all fat gits now like us and the Americans, without so much as a skinny leg in sight.
Then up on the campsite, it was full of Dutch people, and the Dutch lasses were all at least 7ft tall! Me and my mate didn’t have much of a chance though, we thought we’d had a good day if we’d managed to find a bar with a space invaders machine in it. And instead of pulling the birds we’d often inevitably blow any chances we had as either he or me or both at the same time, often be in the unappealing position of being slumped over a trough, honking up in the bogs.
There was a group of glamourous, fabulous, model looking girls just a couple of tents a way, it’s got to be said as well that they were well out of our league and anyway their heads were turned by the presence of some cool dude Frenchies in their sports cars. Me and my mate enviously hatched a plan to come back one day, perhaps once we’d made our fortunes and rev up in mini coopers just like in the Italian job – of course we never did ð.
So, we did actually make it to Chamonix, but it was wet, in fact it was wet all over, absolutely tipping it down ð§. You wouldn’t have known that there were any mountains there as mist covered the place. We spent a couple of miserable wet days on the campsite as it was also too expensive to drink in the bars, especially given our meagre funds. We decided to cut our losses and we made an hastily retreat back to a place that we’d stopped off earlier on route, an unremarkable village called Culoz (pronounced ‘Culo’ as I found out some years later). Although on the main line, Culoz is obviously a sleepy old place that everyone just passes by. I think we must have been the first English people to call in since 1945, because the old locals were very welcoming, in fact it was a absolute privilege to drink with a bunch of old boys complete with their berets in the bar and who had all been members of the French resistance. They regaled us with unbelievable war time tales, I will never forget it.
Then one morning, whilst composing myself in the tent for the first visit of the day to the hole in the ground, with early signs of hangover recovery from the previous nights drunken stupor I had a strange feeling. It was almost like an out of body experience as it seemed as though I was floating, weird. I unzipped the tent, to find that the whole campsite was flooded, and our tent was floating, with me and my mate in it! We immediately abandoned tent, carrying our sleeping bags and all our positions to the only dry spot we could find which was the toilet block (yes – the one with the afore mentioned hole in the ground) and this was only just above water. Nightmare! We found out later that in times of heavy rainfall, the authorities would control the flow down the Rhone-Saone by releasing water from the various barrages. Apparently, we were in the South of France during the wettest July for a number of years and they’d gone and deliberately flooded the campsite that we were on.
The locals, true to their good name came to our rescue. They put us up in the town hall, and so it was that the next morning when I again woke up in the aftermath of a drunken stupor it was this time to the sound of typewriters. We were sleeping on the floor of an office in the town hall, and people were working at desks around us typing away. Unbelievable, maybe, no-one has ever believed me, but it is true ðĪ.
Although we had our train tickets to get home, and pennies for our bus fare for when we got back to Bradford, we only had 70 centimes between us when we travelled back. We used it to buy a ‘du pain’ in Paris as we had to wait almost 24 hours for our train connection there. We ended up going to Dunkerque instead of Calais that was on the ticket but in those days, no-one said anything. And when I got home having carted a couple of bottles of treasured local red plonk all the way home, I sat down with my family for Sunday dinner, and I proudly opened one of the bottles whilst explaining how we had lived off the stuff for 2 weeks and how proud the locals were to show us how they made the wine etc. When I plipped the cork there were greenflies floating in the wine! Presumably French ones ð·.
If you have read all this, then well done for enduring this tale and thank you for prompting me to reminisce – those were the days! ðŽ
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