a bientot!

matthew and i never wrote about it in our blogs, or told anyone about our thumb-stopping escapade.
partly because our american families and friends would find us mad.
partly because it was such a long day we never sat to write it down...


the bus/train situation from toulouse back to the farm on mirande sent matthew and i on a reel of arguments and exhaustion. we got a series of unhelpful help, and took out our frustrations on one another while waiting in terminal after terminal.

silence
cigarette
next bus

while roasting in the second to last bus with our ears and eyes plugged into devices, we realized that the bus was so late we would miss our connection.
we threw ourselves from the bus only to watch our connection round the corner out of town.
we were stuck, in auch; a small boring but cute village about 45 minutes away from the farm by car.

the next bus would leave in the morning
hostels were not an options, hotels were over our budget... way over.

we are at a random indian restaurant glaring at each other like it is the other's fault the bus was late, and desperately trying to get ahold of our friends louisa and stuart.

the peruvian in me blurts, "let's walk"
for the first time in days i saw matthew's eyes sparkle like a little girl with a new pony
"the worst thing that can happen is we don't make it before we get tired, and in that case, we sleep in a cornfield or something until the sun comes up"
"or, we can hitch-hike"

and the plan is made: we will walk in the general direction of the farm, without a map, asking anyone we see along the way if we are going the right way. it is 8pm on a weekday in rural france, and there is little to no one about, so.... you can see the brilliance of our plan.


we start walking, we get set in the right direction and giggled at by a few locals who check the width of my arm to see if little lu is strong enough to make the hike.

matthew and i are literaly singing as we walked down the empty roads of the "city" to the edge of town.

"when do you think we should put our thumbs out so see if anyone can carry us closer to mirande?"
"right now, quick!"

boom
the thumb is out
and one for one, the sweetest grandma pulls over to ask where we are off to
in seconds we are piling in the back

the more matthew and i spoke in broken french, the farther she carried us and told us about her grandkids.
"se va le tet!" she says her friends tell her for picking up thumb stoppers, but she likes meeting people.
She ends up being able to carry us about 30 minutes, and she probably would have taken us to the doorstep if we had asked.

we pile out under a full moon, and she tells us that we need to say goodbye as "see you soon"-"a bientot"(i think) instead of "orevoir" because that is the gasgone way and we can tell everyone that we learned french in gasgone country.

"a bientot!"

and we hiked the last stretch on the two lane road in the fields of gascogne.