Traveling day, part II

Saturday, continued:

The long drive south, into the mountains of the Massif Central:




It rained most of the eleven-hour drive south, but as the clouds finally cleared we saw that a rainbow was waiting for us and we naively allowed ourselves to believe that all would at last begin to go smoothly ...


until, less than an hour away from our hotel, we encountered several signs which tried to prevent us from going forward.


But we were travel-weary and by now somewhat desperate to get to our hotel which, according to the directions emailed to us last week, should have been only a few more miles down this road. So:

1. I uttered aloud for the first time a phrase which is now becoming a sort of mantra for this trip: "what's the worst that could happen?" and
2. we agreed to pretend we didn't speak enough French to understand these signs and drove right past them.

Which you'd think would be a good idea. But then we saw this one:


And we were both like, "oh, they mean it ..." It's hard to argue with emphatic sentenceless punctuation.

So we had to turn around and take a different route, which ended up adding another two hours to the trip, but so what? we'd already been traveling for 26 hours straight on virtually no sleep.

But the detour turned out to be a stroke of good luck because we got to see many wondrous things, including a cloud caught in a valley:

~~~~~~~

I should probably say that our map hasn't been very helpful. Our hotel (Hotel Saluces) is in Salers, a very small medieval village which would be hard enough to find even in daylight. And navigation wasn't made any easier by the fact that someone had painted over all the town names and direction signs for at least 40 miles in every direction.