Saturday found us road-tripping south to Toulouse. The team wanted to avoid a debacle similar to that which surrounded our travel to Montpelier- a last minute increase in our train tickets nearly doubled the team’s cash outlay- so we traveled in the ultimate budget option, a minibus. Now, I can hear what you’re saying. “Ev, […]
Saturday found us road-tripping south to Toulouse. The team wanted to avoid a debacle similar to that which surrounded our travel to Montpelier- a last minute increase in our train tickets nearly doubled the team’s cash outlay- so we traveled in the ultimate budget option, a minibus. Now, I can hear what you’re saying. “Ev, there’s no way that’s going to be cheaper to move a baseball team down to Toulouse, you can only fit eight or nine guys in one of those things.”
That would reveal an inherent flaw in your logic, because even after enlisting the aid of a player called up from Bois-Guillaume’s regional team (the fourth-highest level of baseball in France, after Elite, N1A, and N1B), we left Normandy with only eight players, with Quentin planning to stay at his nearby home on Saturday night and meet us in the morning. That’s right, nine ballplayers for a doubleheader against arguably the best team in the league under a hot Mediterranean sun. Welcome to French baseball, huh? “Good luck, boys!”
Toulouse is in the very southeast of France, just about 250 km northwest of the intersection between the bottom left and bottom sides of the country’s hexagon shape. It’s roughly 800 km (500m) from Rouen, which sits in the upper left corner near England, which makes for an approximately 6.5 hour trip. It’s the equivalent of driving from San Francisco to San Diego, with the exception that the speed limit is typically 110km/hour, which works out to approximately 69 miles per hour. While I’ve been told that police are more vigilant on speed traps in France, everyone seems to exceed the speed limit as a matter of course. 120 km/hour is standard, and 150 km/hour doesn’t seem to be at all out of the question.
We left around 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, with Eric driving the first two or three hours out of Rouen, Aldo taking the wheel second, and me handling the graveyard shift into Toulouse. Popular opinion dictated a dinner at the dreaded MacDo’s, though I narrowly avoided my second MacDisaster by grabbing an overpriced ham-and-cheese sandwich at a gas station/rest stop earlier.
My recent- and as expected, entirely satisfying- stop at In’N’Out Burger had only heightened my disdain for the Golden Arches. To me, eating MacDonald’s in France is like ordering Bud Light at Octoberfest, or signing up for Match.Com as the starting quarterback at FSU; an ill-advised and unnecessarily expensive option given the plethora of vastly superior options available if you’re only willing to look a little harder. It’s like drafting Sam Bowie over Jordan, Olajuwon, Bird, Russell, Chamberlain, the Colossus of Rhodes, and Jesus Christ. (It was a hell of a draft.) While you can order a beer at MacDo’s in France, a clear point in its favor even if it is only 1664 (or French Rolling Rock, as I like to think of it), you can also apparently smoke, judging by the four ostensibly health-conscious teenagers who polished off their low-fat salads and promptly fired up a few Marlboros. Overall, it’s just a place you want to stay the hell out of.
When we finally arrived in Toulouse, we were lucky to spot the dilapidated (and surprisingly well-concealed) sign directing us to our hotel, the Formule 1. The Formule 1 is something of an institution in French baseball. Most of the teams that traveled to Normandy for the Challenge De France stayed at a nearby F1, and my road trips to La Guerche with Savigny and Montpelier with Bois-Guillaume both featured stays behind their now familiar yellow and red-loged entryways.
The thing about the F1s, are, well, they’re really tiny and really cheap, hence their popularity among chronically under-funded French ballclubs. Imagine a French Econolodge, for example. They cram three guys into a room that’s about the size of the average pitcher’s mound, and they do it with a double bed and a lofted bunkbed on top. You can see Matt’s and my stuff strewn around one of them below:
Two other items of note give the F1 its unique “European backpacker”-style feel. First, the toilets and bathrooms are shared in the hallways with every other guest of the hotel, and their woefully inadequate number often leads to lines of perfect strangers in their hallways during morning rush hour, waiting in their towels and bath robes for the next one to open. Interestingly, these small cubbies have an auto-clean function that scrubs the recently-abandoned vessel with boiling water, noxious gas, and spinning blades whenever you leave. I may have made that part up, but I still get nervous anytime I’ve been in one of them a while that the auto-clean might start with me still inside.
Second, the hotel provides a free breakfast every morning, or as the French call it, the least important meal of the day. While I have gone on at great length of the joys of French cuisine, they still haven’t gotten the upper hand on the great big American lumberjack breakfasts of eggs, home fries, toast, bacon, corn beef hash, and sausages. Instead, the F1 hooks you up with bread, butter, and coffee, which I’m pretty sure was the daily rations at the Chateau D’If during the Monte Cristo days. Like the bathrooms, this is a communal meal, which means that you’ve got a French baseball team trooping down to the lobby to share this bread and butter feast with the same stunned denizens it just rubbed shoulders with outside the bathrooms and showers. You can see a perfectly good example of this in the horrified look on this poor woman’s face below:
Tomorrow: the games in Toulouse!