One Infinite Loop: A Road Trip- Part I

Two weekends ago I went on a road trip with three of my friends...

No, it wasn't like this:



Or this..


It was more like:

minus all the sex + this minus all the city


So, by process of reverse psychology it was this:

And since when one compares oneself and one's friends to the girls from Sex and the City it is obligatory to define exactly which character each of you are....

1. Regan was Carrie because she has the best style of all of us, and a fashion blog, and her mom's name is Carrie.
2. Ryan was Samantha because he's sexy.
3. I was Charlotte because I was the mother on board.
4. and Tom was Miranda because.. well someone has to be..

We picked up our chariot at Gare du Nord on Friday morning, spent about 20 minutes in the parking lot trying to figure out how to make the car go forwards and then were off like a herd of turtles. We looped around the Peripherique (the highway that encircles Paris, inhibiting the city from ever growing beyond it.. a concept that I quite like) and headed toward Chateau Fountainbleu.







There, we met up with my philosophy class, for a planned field trip with my professor. We toured the majestic palace that King Francis I built in 1527. Let's all take a moment and give it up to Francis for emphasizing the importance of writing and poetry and subsequently inventing the library system, and for being a great patron of the arts (supporting Leonardo Da Vinci among others). He was a pretty cool guy.



Fountainbleu is gorgeous and in some ways more in impressive than Versailles because it is all original and intact. Whereas Versailles is mostly copies of the originals, since it was gutted during the French Revolution.

After the field trip we hopped back in the car and headed off to our next destination. But before driving too far we stopped at a supermarket to buy lunch and munchies:

• A bag of apples
• a bag of oranges
• Muesli bars
• Baguettes
• Babybel Cheeses
• Dijon
• Ham

The apples and oranges were a great move. They lasted us the entire weekend. Which is pretty remarkable since Ryan and I would eat one or the other every time we got bored.

However, the same cannot be said of the muesli bars, which, despite my attempts to ration, were gobbled up almost instantly by Miranda- er Tom.

The Baguette, babybel and Dijon Sandwiches were our answer to a cheap fast food lunch. I think more bread landed on the floor of the car in the form of crumbs than in our mouths:

We were heading in the general direction of The Loire Valley where the Chateaux de La Loire are. Where we were sleeping that night, we didn't know. The sun set like a impressionist painting over the snowy fields. Every now and again we would stop the car to get our ya-ya's out. First at an open field near a nuclear power plant for a quick run through an open snowy field.
The next time to just jump for joy...


When it got dark we pulled into a small town called Ambroise and sent the boys out into the cold to find us an affordable room for the night. When things started to seem a little bleak and as if we were going to sleep in the car and die of hypothermia, our brave, valiant men found us a perfect room above a tiny bar for 40E a night. Did I mention there was a castle literally across the street.


After settling in having a drink with the locals in the bar downstairs, we went out to explore the night life, after all it was Friday night. But the thing about Ambroise is.. it's a ghost town. There was not a soul in sight. So we just explored; walking up a long flight of stairs to the top to the entrance to the castle that looks over the whole city,



walking along the cobble stone streets, stopping at every real estate office to pick out which Chateau in the French country side we were all going to chip in a buy.

We went to sleep that night at the juvenile hour of 11:00, as we had a long day of traveling and site seeing ahead of us.

The day had been "perfect" even though we had barely done anything but sit in the car. I can't speak for the others, but I had begun to feel a bit like I was in a vacuum, in limbo. It wasn't scary Catholic limbo, though, more like an equilibrium.

On the one hand this was an very "grown up" and "serious" thing to be doing full of warnings, consequences, and potentially anxiety inducing factors; renting a car for the first time, in a foreign country, etc. But on the other hand, I had lost all sense of time, urgency, obligation (not to mention my cellphone somewhere packed deep in the trunk of the car) and I felt like a child who had not yet been introduced to the concepts of past and future. I wasn't thinking about the end of the trip. The weekend seemed infinite at that point. All that existed to me was in that car; my 3 perfect friends, babybel wrappers, baguette crumbs and all.

France's infrastructure is made up of rotaries. The rotaries became kinda my thing. They are awesome; frequent, well marked, and fun to drive around. When we got lost (which we did quite a bit) it wasn't a big deal because we would just find the next rotary, circle around until we found the exit necessary to get back on the right track and continue on without ever having to stop or lose momentum.