My flight ended up being delayed by an hour, but it was less of a real delay and really just boarding taking forever. On the bright side, my flight leaving at 1:30 meant I was exhausted by the time we took off. I had a middle seat, but some guy wanted to sit next to his girlfriend and traded me his aisle seat. This gave my long legs some more room to breathe.
I didn’t even have a neck pillow or sleep mask, yet I managed to sleep through almost the entire flight. I woke up here and there, but wasn’t fully awake until I had less than an hour left in the flight.
As we descended and prepared for landing, I did the time conversions in my head and realized we were landing an hour later than expected. This meant that I would likely miss my bus back to Grenoble. Rather than having to sprint through airport and take a pricey uber to the bus station, I just accepted my fate. I didn’t need that stress right now.
Upon landing, I switched out my sim cards and started looking for a new way back to Grenoble. Luckily I was able to cancel my bus and get a voucher back for Flixbus. This wasn’t super helpful though because the next Flixbus left at 11:00 pm. It was 3:00 when I landed for reference. I’d much rather sleep in a bed and not a bus tonight.
I ended up finding a BlaBlaCar to Grenoble. I have explained this service in my blog before, but it is essentially long distance Uber. If someone is doing a long drive and has seats open, they post it on the app. I found someone going to Grenoble leaving an hour and half from now. I booked it and headed to downtown Paris.
I found a bus from the airport and manged to put my excess coins to use when paying for it. After a twenty minute ride, I was in the city and took the Paris Metro to the meeting spot. I was meeting the driver next to a certain Metro stop and headed there next.
The driver texted me and said he would be there in twenty minutes. There was a nice park next to the metro stop, so I sat in there while I waited.
The Park
Eventually my driver arrived. He had a white van and seemed like he worked for some plumbing company or something based on the contents of the van. He had a lot of good reviews on BlaBlaCar and seemed nice enough, so I hopped in the front seat. Now I had a six hour drive to get through with a stranger.
In situations like this, I wasn’t in the mood to be chatty and instantly plugged in my headphones. I knew I had a long drive ahead of me, so I bought the audio book version of The Shining by Stephen King.
This driver definitely was not the most focused one. He drove pretty fast and used his phone almost the whole time. He would switch between talking on the phone to people or playing Angry Birds and poker on his phone. This was a bit concerning, but I really had no other ways to get home and figured that he had enough good reviews to not crash while driving me. I tried to just listen to my audiobook and not focus on his driving.
This was not too hard because the French countryside offered some great views. There were gigantic fields covered with this one type of yellow flowers. A google search told me that it was rapeseed flowers. These are used to make rapeseed oil, or canola as the US calls it due to the vulgar name. Considering “rape” means shredded in French, I guess they are less concerned with the vulgarity of the name. Nevertheless, the flowers were pretty to look at.
The Flowers
I also saw a bunch of gigantic wind mills. These looked impressive over the green and yellow fields.
Windmills
The driver must have been tired because he stopped three separate times to drink a coffee and smoke a cigarette. I guess I was just grateful he wasn’t smoking in the car.
My driver on one of this breaks
The rest of the drive pretty much consisted of me switching from trying to sleep to listening to my audio book. I gave up on the sleeping after a while because my neck was getting really sore. Man, I really miss my neck pillow.
A little before 11 PM, I finally arrived in Grenoble. The driver may have stopped too many times for coffee, but at least he drove recklessly and fast to get me to Grenoble on time. I parted ways with the driver and started to walk home. When I got home, everyone was asleep.
It felt pretty odd coming back to the house and my room after being in the US for a few days. I guess this is what they call reverse-reverse culture shock. Despite being sleepy the whole car ride, my body decided to feel wide awake once I got back. I unpacked and just relaxed for a bit. It had gotten a lot warmer in France since I left and my room was noticeably more stuffy. Around twelve, I forced myself to go to bed. I had a lot to get done tomorrow.
Foreign Tourist with No Grasp of the Local Language 
Leave a comment