The Bourgeois Bicycle Caravan

The road is now straight and flat, more or less and give or take, except the suddenly most inconvenient Bassin D’Arcachon. Couldn’t the Germans have filled it in during the Second Great War? Or why not you, Boney? You lazy Corsican ladder climber. The caravan does really enjoy a good ferry crossing, but it is also that damnable time of year in the Southwest where anything of use is closed. No one around to ask apart from hunters and soes Del approaches an ol’ digger armed to the teeth - but he had and empty bag and tried to make excuses in sign language that there wasn’t anything to shoot. He was a nice man with no idea what the hell was happening and we hid from him, then once emerged from the bushes the caravan went in the opposite direction to his gracious yet bewildering directions, so as not to offend that morning sharpshooter. This day is great and glorious as the sun really shows the damp what for and makes warming apologies to those wet animals and if Hellybutt doesn’t quit trying to relive Dylan’s back catalogue then someone really will steal his flute and that won’t be very cute.

Cap Ferret has the jetty with the necessary ferry and Del sleeps in the sun on a rock wall and he looks so warm and rested. The ferry man is a nice chap - he has to be because otherwise the caravan has to ride back near 50 kilometres and what great story doesn’t have a metaphorical ferry man in it? None dear readers! Again the French just stand there when bicycles and trailers and boards are struggled up a skinny landing ladder, Hellybutt has lost all diplomatic sense and cusses when they not only fail to help, but stand in the “goddamned way and somebody’s gonna get a gosh darn punch in the mouth if they don’t move”.

Soul is soothed on the afternoon road into Biscarrosse, the cycle path was a set of piano keys, golden ground evenly spaced with pine shade. The caravan whistles into town, and then it starts to get cold - below 5 degrees, so it was guessed - so some wheeler-dealer called Jacque sends us shivering to a beautifully white palace and a man named Phillipe takes us in. He smiles at us and we go to the Rio de Jeinero room and try not to get anything dirty. Impossible, we be the filthiest travellers travellin’.

Sitting it out, sitting on it, sitting under this rock pelting, shore-shaping weather. Three absorbed children of the eighties sitting inside of three wooden garden sheds - which leaked and the doors spoke in the high winds - the owner wasn’t anywhere to be seen and it made one wonder what she could be doing in Lacanau-Ocean, it was all boarded up. Then it collectively dawns - that well maybe she’s got a car and that people do still have cars and that they can drive around with fingers brazenly pointed at the clouds of thunder and sheets of rain, then go and visit their grandchildren or buy lotto tickets from the corner tabac store. More testings from God or whoever was conducting the whole orchestra, which was absolutely booming away on the sands, with gigantic swells rushing the beach - rounding out and foaming white, with no seagulls considering a lil’ ol’ whirly whirl above the crests. However! Like good old moonshiner’s, or something, the caravan rolls out the barrels and unleashes the soul distracting drink and then just throw your head out of that tiny gnome window and yell “GO ON THEN! KEEP BLOWING YOU BASTARD!” and even though the 50 knot winds whip that sentiment up and away it has still been said so there.

It simply must be done, a quick looky inside of an out of season beachside disco-tech. The beautiful sorrow and the wilting flowers staggering about the mostly empty dancefloor. Drunk kids and the chorus of out of town ladies celebrating one of the girls birthdays, idiotic jail bait being eyed by old bar-barracudas; all distorted in rotating primary colours - a nightmare of Hunteresque, proportions written in French. Bodean buys a round of international safety beer and nobodies drunk enough to handle all this sorrow and it’s kinda introspective to watch, and that’s way too deep for any member of the caravan.

And there’s the weather break. WHOP! Straight back into the fray and Hellybutt hits a pine cone on the road outta town and the trailer flips again. This time he’s ready and vaults over the handle bars landing on his feet and checking the boards are okay? Yes. What about the hands and bones? None broken - Good. Now swear enough to make all the world’s sailors blush and throw that pine cone back into the days of Napoleon’s first plantings. We then, calm as you like, reload those trailers and slink back into the forest.