Stopping only for benzine, we raced to toulouse, to the farmer's market, to provision our picnic basket so we could avoid the culinary ravages of burger king, mcdonalds, et al, on our way back.
Paranoid, now, I staid with the car while Mrs shopped in Toulouse, regrettably missing out on the sights and smells . . . I was only able to snap this picture from my camera phone as we whizzed by leaving as an afterthought. . . but she had scored a chicken roasted with herbs, a loaf of olive bread, some nectarines, and some cheese, which she had selected in what we call Lupe mode: an adventurous choice of an unknown foodstuff.
Then we drove and drove and drove . . .The french countryside is lovely but the eye grows blase' as if after several hours at the grand canyon . . . from the freeway . . . evenmoreso . . . this bridge caught our eye . . . we stopped and took pictures of it after we had past, but the best one was from within the car, thru the windshield, before we went thru . . . has something to do with the Dali-esque appearance of the bridge before those clouds . . .Dam', Dali-on-the-brain . . . may have to go to the hokey Dali museum in Prg, after all. . .
the trip back was uneventful . . . the countdown on the TomTom was excruciating . . . I kept asking Mrs, when are we going to turn East, instead of North!? The best part was the lunch we had provisioned ourselves . . .the chicken was superb, the nectarines like from the garden of eden, the olive bread was fabulous, but the cheese . . . I tho't I had achieved the sophisticated palate to appreciate any cheese no matter how . . . challenging . . . but even my juvenile sense of decorum prevents me from describing how this cheese tasted to me . . . Mrs wouldn't even try a nibble . . . "I SAW your face!" she said, "and I can smell it." we thru it away at the next stop. SHe'd tho't it might be a sort of camembert . . .a softish-yellowish cheese, but then we wondered . . . was it Limberger? of Our Gang Fame?
We had our music but the only other entertainment we had was once when the TomTom got confused. Tho' we were still on the freeway, the TomTom narrator started issuing confusing instructions, "get off, get on, turn around", the display started flashing discordant, disjointed maps, the cursor started flying off the road, like a wingman -- for like 11 miles, the cursor shadowed us, off road. The coordinates must have been mis-entered is all I can figger, there wasn't an old road over there or anything . . .
Later, much later that night, as we crossed the german/czech border, TomTom freaked out again, ordered me off the freeway. . . exhausted, I followed mindlessly . . .instead of cruising we were suddenly inching around little by-roads in a small village, taking some perceived short-cut . . . there was construction, so even more wildly, we were taking detours in the darkest-before-dawn-dark on a route that was clearly, in retrospect, another bug in the programming.
When we got back on the freeway I spied a car pulling a boat on a trailer that I had past before. Oh, well.
We pulled into the circle near our apt in PRG without further trauma. We went up together on the first trip, but I left Mrs in the apt. while I carried all else up . . . 8 trips . . . I've never felt so paranoid in Prg before as when I was carrying up the cases of wine and armagnac, at 4am.
They say that the doing is the pleasure, not the having done, but finally getting back to the Apt. with all that stuff, was a good feeling, even now.
Next day we lounged about after getting the car back -- noticed that the traffic was heavier than when we left, since everyone has come back from vacation, back into the city . . . Mrs washed clothes, we watched two movies, we ordered Indian Food Delivery from Himalya . . . took 'em 3 hours to deliver, almost worth it. . . . I savored some rare imported Armagnac.
Monday could not possibly be a good day, I figgered.
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