All Saint's Day (Will's Perspective)

 If the next morning was any clue, I think the verdict was the alcohol did me in the night before, not my jetlag (I am still baffled as to how I completely dodged the wrath of a nine hour time change). However, I've definitely felt worse before and there was no time to waste moping around so I sucked it up and we started our day. A couple glasses of water, breakfast, and a shower made me feel like a new person. It was then time to get the car to start our adventures!

Since it was All Saints Day, pretty much everything around was closed so the streets were pretty quiet as we walked through town on the way to get our car from the pick up location at Montpellier's train station. While it didn't occur to me at that point, it was probably a good thing that everyone was at home enjoying the holiday instead of being out and about so my first experience driving in Europe wouldn't be quite as chaotic. We got to the train station and went into the car rental office. When signing the forms, the woman asked us if we wanted to get full insurance for an extra forty euros. Kaitlyn and I looked at each other, had an entire conversation with our eyes in about a second and a half, and at the same time, turned back to the woman and said "yes!" If you'd seen the width of some of the roads in town, you would have done the same. We signed the forms and and were given the keys to a Fiat 500. Wandering through the parking lot, trying to find our car, we both noticed a bright red Fiat about twenty parking spaces away surrounded by a bunch of cars of more subtle colors. We were both stoked when I pressed the lock button and the little red car beeped and flashed its lights. It was so perfect and so European and so fun. It definitely wasn't the manliest car around, but hey, when in Rome (or Montpellier).

Kaitlyn (falsely) accuses me of being a bad driver, but even so, I did 90% of the driving for the week. I think she just wanted to not be liable in any way in case something happened, so she could say "Told you so" if we lost a mirror or something on an impossibly narrow road. It was probably better that we did it that way anyway because Kaitlyn had a phone with working GPS. We took a very roundabout way back to the residences (VERY roundabout) but we got there in one piece, no dents or scratches anywhere. I think road signs are pretty intuitive no matter where you are, so even though they are very different from ours for the most part, I didn't have nearly as much confusion as I expected. Also, did you know that the French use stop signs that are identical to our own that even say "Stop?" Apparently a lot of countries do that. I had no idea. I'm obviously not very observant.

Once back at the residences, we showed and packed a bag and hit the road with les gorges de l'Herault, a recreational area about 40 minutes away. Twenty five minutes of the drive was pretty standard highway driving, albeit with the occasional French farmhouse and vineyard here and there scattered among the countryside. The next fifteen minutes or so were on small country roads through the farm fields, passing through a couple of tiny towns with even smaller roads. Everything was pretty beautiful despite the cloudy weather. We finally found l'Herault, the river that Montpellier's surrounding area is named after (or maybe the other way around. What do I know? I'm just a tourist!) and we followed it upstream into the mountains. We passed le Pont du Diable, a really old stone bridge (built in the tenth or eleventh century) that crosses the gorge and eventually found our first planned stop of the day, la Grotte de Clamouse. It's a massive cave structure discovered in the 1940s and has on of the largest caves in the world that is open to the public. The tour may have been even more memorable than the caves themselves. First of all, they were celebrating Halloween that day at the cave, so there were a ton of young kids dressed in costume on the tour with us. A bunch of their parents were dressed up too, including one guy in a clown costume that freaked us out because he'd always be standing right behind us whenever we turned around in the dark caves. Our tour guide was dressed as a vampire. It was all pretty cheesy but the cute kids in costume made it worth it. We felt left out dressed in normal clothes! Second, it was about half tour, half performance. At one point a man played a guitar and sang a song about the caves, and farther along, there was a light show set to music in the largest cavern. Third, though we had a handheld audio guide in English, we were sharing it and forgot to use it in some rooms, leaving us very entertained but not much wiser as to the cave's formation and history.

Our next stop was up the road a few kilometers. The road clung to the side of the gorge, l'Herault swirling over boulders and crashing into pools a couple hundred feet below. We knew we were going to the town of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert and it was a UNICEF location but neither of us really knew what to expect. It was perfect. It was this tiny town tucked in a nook in the mountains, verdant cliffs and rocky outcroppings towering overhead. The town looks like it hasn't changed a bit in hundreds of years. We parked and continued on foot to the town square. There is a massive oak tree in the middle of the square. Underneath the tree are a couple dozen tables belonging to the cafes and restaurants that line the square. One side of the square has the church and monastery that that town was built around so many years ago (early 800s!). With a population of a little more than 200 people, walking from one end of town to the other would have taken just a few minutes if everything wasn't so beautiful and perfect. Our photo breaks and wandering in awe slowed us down, but we had nowhere else to be so we were able to enjoy our time there.

 Fun fact: just a few months earlier, Kaitlyn and I were in New York City and we spent a rainy day wandering the Cloisters museum at the far north end of Manhattan. Unbeknownst to us at the time, we saw part of the monastery from Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert that day and would see the original source four and a half months later.

We were starting to get hungry so we revisited the town square, where we found a creperie that looked pretty delicious. My new love of goat cheese from earlier in the week was not a fluke, as I thoroughly enjoyed Kaitlyn's chevre and honey and nut crepe. It was dark as could be by the time we left town but we were well-fed and thoroughly satisfied with our day as we drove back the way we came, cruising along those tiny roads back to the highway, French pop songs on the radio. When we got back to Montpellier, Molly had us over for tea so we could plan the next day's trip to Carcassone. Once we agreed on a meeting time and place, Kaitlyn and I went back to her room where we just hung out for the rest of the night, watching the movie Bottle Shock before falling asleep.