Hitch 2012 - Day Two, To Paris

We arrived in France at 6.45, freezing cold and in a tiny little village near Caen. We walked up to a roundabout with a sign for N10, which we thought was close, but apparently was not. After it had taken us about an hour to walk up there, we then had to wait another half hour for someone to pick us up. Although, after a few minutes some French kids pulled over and asked us if we wanted a lift, but they were going in the wrong direction. Eventually a business type guy pulled over and gave s a lift to a roundabout just outside Caen. After a while a guy named Mortimer pulled over. We opened the door and just as Aiden was about to ask 'Parlez-vous Anglais?' Mortimer said 'put your stuff in the back..' His mother was English, so he spoke it very well, although he did joke about speaking French as we should be trying to learn. He was only going to take us as far as Lisieux, but after a while he offered to take us as far as Evreux, but he needed to pick up his dad first, so we agreed and he drove us through these beautiful villages to his fathers house, where at one point we even saw a castle, similar looking to a Disney one.

When we were driving we noticed all these beautiful houses, and Mortimer would say that they were not as nice as his fathers, which was true. They invited us in for a cup of coffee, and the inside of the house was as stunning as the outside with pictures of Mortimers children and dozens of postcards in the kitchen. The outside was tudor-style with things hanging off the walls. Although cluttered, it really was beautiful. There was a moment where his dad started getting out pretty sharp looking tools, and I swear if they'd brought out a spade too I would have made a run for it. But no, everything was fine and they dropped us in a little village somewhere where we got some lunch and I got a cake with cream and raspberries wrapped in a pancake. We then got picked up by a French woman who had seven children! She wasn't going to take us all the way but then decided that she wasn't late so took us to the outskirts of Paris.

It then took us an hour to walk to the Eiffel tower where there was a massive two hour queue to go up, and so we fell asleep under it instead. After a few hours we went about looking for somewhere to stay, and decided on the camp-site near where we'd been dropped off. It ended up being uch further than we'd thought and we walked for hours to get there, but at around 7pm we had the tent up and were pretty happy with the idea of a shower and sleep. There was even an English girl at the desk! Aiden went to sleep pretty quickly, and I wandered off to check out the shop and buy some pizza before trying to sleep on the not-so-comfortable floor.