Europe Day 6

I got a fresh taste of French assholery on Day 6 when my waiter told me I couldn't sit in the back of the restaurant because it was, and I quote, "for dinner". Two sets of doors were open, despite it being 9 degrees Celsius outside (to the one american who views this blog multiple times a day, I'm not sure what that is in dog years). He directed me toward a table that was directly in front of one set of open doors, and I asked if he could close the doors. Then he said that he would close the other set of doors, but not "these doors", and I think this may have had something to do with evil spirits the waiter encountered on his vision quest because, hell, I'm telling the story I can spice it up if I wish. Then he collected orders from the five of us and forgot mine, just took all the menus and started walking away. Being sick of Europe 120 hours prior to this event, I yelled out "Excuse me!" and he turned around, along with everyone else in the restaurant. Then he took my order, prick French bastard. I ordered tapas again, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Apparently I am now one of those stuffed shirts who prefers his orange juice fresh squeezed, and preferences are not welcome in my comparatively-low-income (family medicine not opthalmology) 4-child-family future. My wife is going to be so angry with me. Why do we have to occupy counter space with a press that only makes one type of juice, she'll nag. Because the other stupid juicers aren't as easy to clean, I'll yell from my bike repair station in the basement.

My mom wanted to buy a commemorative plate with our picture printed on it. I know, right? That delayed our trip from Lourdes to Nice significantly. We also stopped by a couple of souvenir shops, much to my father's chagrin because it was decided, after our little uphill scare, that I cannot drive the car because I am "not trained at manual driving" and may incur the same minor repair-not-needed problem that I incurred on Day 5. My Dad doesn't handle distance driving as aggressively as I do (stop only to fill gas or urinate, eat in the car, bring coffee and get it done) so we made a couple of longer stops for food and for toilet/coffee, and we ended up getting into Nice a good 2 hours later than the GPS said we would arrive. Then the GPS got confused in Nice because all the roads are very close together and turnoffs are in abundance. My Dad basically can't read road signs at all at night, and for some reason refuses to wear his glasses while he's driving (not that we suggested at the time, I'm just assuming this because he didn't have them on) and he also has exactly zero experience using a gps on his own to get around, so I was navigating us the whole time, and on the hill to the hotel there were two turnoffs and I ended up directing him into the wrong one. Now my Dad went into a tight downhill next to the hotel and had to be directed back up, but he got into this inexperience-related problem of the car rolling downward every time he tried to reverse uphill. This was very concerning for us as the downhill was, for some reason, lined by large metal poles and other small cars. When we finally made it back up the hill, I delayed directing him toward the turn for the hotel beecaaaauuussseee the gate was closed. I went up there and found out the reception closes at 7 pm. Luckily someone else was already there trying to get into the hotel, and actually owned a French phone, so she called the emergency line and they said that we had to park on the street for the night because they didn't know the code to open the "big gate" but we could open the "small gate" and get ourselves and our bags into our rooms. This whole process took 45 minutes.

Upon entering the hotel, we found out that the internet costs 5 euros, "opening" the phone line costs 5 euros, and using any of the towels given to us wrapped in plastic cost some unspecified amount of money as well. There were also no easily accessed open restaurants, because we didn't want to move the car from the spot we had found and we didn't want to walk "30-35 minutes" to the beach restaurants, or so one passer-by estimated. We dined on sugary treats that night and I went to sleep thinking well, at least I get to rent that bike tomorrow.