Train Station
View of the train yards leaving Paris.
Nothing escapes Agfa film
Don't miss Part II - Link at bottom of this page.
When we went to the train station in Paris on the afternoon before the eclipse, the weather looked ominous. We had already missed one train the previous weekend so we were not about to miss this one. We showed up an hour early. And a good thing too! Unlike the TGV to Bordeaux in which everyone had assigned seats, this train had been sold to standing room.
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Train Station |
View of the train yards leaving Paris. |
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Nothing escapes Agfa film |
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Since we were going to Fécamp to see and photograph the eclipse, I was carrying a good bit of equipment along with our suitcase. On each end of the train car are the baggage racks.... And each was already filled with a passenger! When they saw me with my load, they politely crawled out to make room for our stuff.
The train looked as though it was occupied by a mixture of druids and hippies, the kind of crowd that "Steeley Dan" could sing "Hey, Nineteen" to. They were, for the most part, a young bunch. Kathleen was fascinated with the oozing primordial instinct that seemed to be just below the conscious level of these folks. And with the wacky way that the weather had been changing, 80F on one day then rain then 60F on the next; we were confused as to the season. Was it summer or was it fall? With the fog rolling in, I felt as if we were headed to Stonehinge or some other druid rune.
When we got to our seats, they, too, were occupied. The fellow looked up and spoke something in French that I took to be "Are these your seats?" I showed our tickets with the seat numbers and he and his female companion politely got up. I apologized as we were shifting around in the crowded aisle and I guess that's when he realized that we were American. Kai was his name and he turned out to be a Canadian concert violinist living in Paris. He had just returned from Calgary on a flight that was delayed several times so he had been traveling many hours with no sleep. We immediately struck up a conversation... in English! He said that the train was loaded with nothing but eclipse trekkers. He also wanted to know how we got assigned seats. I told him that we had purchased the tickets the previous week and he was amazed because he had purchased his tickets 5 months earlier and the ticket office said that there were no assigned seats on this train! We talked about France and music and eclipses and stuff for most of the way to Rouen. That's where he and his companion were switching trains. He was supposed to start rehearsals with a piano player. It was for a tour due to start in September in one of the Yugoslavian provinces. I ended up giving him an 8X10 photo that I did from the Aruba eclipse and he gave us one of his CD's. They were really nice folks!
By the time we rolled into Rouen, the weather had gotten bad. It was raining and cold and looked, for all practical purposes, like the end of fall and the beginning of winter. Our tickets said that we were to change trains in Beuzeville, which was about 30K outside of LeHavre. I was on edge because there was only 6 minutes allocated to change trains! As we rolled into Beuzeville, my heart sank. There was only one set of tracks for trains! Where were we to board the next train? I made sure that we were up and had our bags as the train came to a stop. We moved quickly to get off and were immediately lost. There was NO other train! That is a lonely feeling! Kathleen finely found the conductor and asked where the next train was to leave. It took a few moments before the conductor figured out what we were asking. Then he laughed and pointed towards a couple of buses. It was where all of the other passengers were going. We looked at each other .... We looked at the buses .... And except for a few gripes and grumbles, we were happy to know we hadn't messed up. Needless to say, because we had wasted time looking for a train, most of the seats on the buses were occupied. Kathleen sat in the front and I sat in the back. The crowd had thinned out a bit from the several stops that the train had made and had left us with a mixture of the more bizarre passengers, the ones with navel rings, pierced eyebrows, and orange hair. We didn't see this in Paris! Was this Halloween in August? It was about this time that I remembered the story told by Monroe Fisher of his ride on a dilapidated bus in Chili. He was trekking to the tip of South America, a ride in which someone ended up giving a chicken "mouth-to-mouth" resuscitation. The chicken came around, finally. I told the story to Kathleen later and it cheered her up.
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Robert Soubie shows us around Paris. |
While our bags are in airline limbo, we indulge the French way. That's Pierre on the left. |
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Nothing escapes Agfa film |
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The ride to Fécamp was a short one but because of the narrow roads in the countryside of France, it seemed a lot longer. The rain was still coming down when we pulled into Fécamp and Kathleen was worried that we wouldn't meet up with our newfound friend, Robert Soubie. I had conversed with Robert over the Internet on the CCD list and he had invited us to join him in Fécamp for the eclipse. He also had picked us up at the airport when we arrived in Paris a week earlier. To top that off, he even carried us around Paris on this, our first day, and acted as a tour guide as he showed us a highlight of the "City of Lights".
As I said, coming into Fécamp, we could see that this little town was packed with people who had come to see the eclipse. There was a party on just about every corner - even in the rain. On one of the traffic circles was a giant pair of eclipse glasses that measured about 3ft by 6ft. On one corner was a street vendor with bottle after bottle of "Eclipse Fécamp '99 Cidre de Normandie" (Apple cider)!
We got off of the bus and grabbed our stuff from the baggage compartment and started looking around for Robert. Out of the night, out of nowhere, "Out of the Silent Planet" came Robert. We were so relieved. He had his new car (actually his hadn't come in and the dealer had loaned this one to him) and proceeded to heard us up, load our stuff, and head off to find a café. While we were driving around, he told us of his drive up from Bordeaux earlier. He said that the traffic was horrific and that it had taken a lot longer than normal to get to Fécamp. Of course, getting into Fécamp itself had been a problem because the police were restricting access to the eclipse path. Only those people with passes were allowed in and no one was allowed out. I looked at Kathleen and she looked at me. Robert said, "Oh, don't worry. I have your passes plus a tent for you to sleep in. And sleeping bags, too. And passes to get into the viewing area! And we will have ham and cheese sandwiches and coffee for breakfast!" Our host, again, was way too gracious.
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The shadows of the church on the cloud cover. |
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Robert Soubie shows us the Eclipse Fécamp '99 Cidre de Normandie. |
Finishing a late meal. |
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Nothing escapes Agfa film | |
Every conceivable parking spot in town seemed to be filled and so did all of the cafés. We finally found a place to park and went looking for a place that had crapes. On the way from one café to the next, we went down a small back street. There, in the dark, above the tops of the buildings, appeared the shadow of a church on the surface of the low-lying clouds. It was a stunning apparition. I had to get a photo.
We found, at last, a café with space and proceeded to order supper. Robert ordered a bottle of the Eclipse Fécamp '99 Cidre de Normandie and proceeded to tell of the Normandie cider and the apples that were grown in the area. Elodie talked of her brother who had just started a job in Paris and talked about her boyfriend. Mary, Robert's daughter, was on the verge of nodding off to sleep. When I looked at my watch, it must have been close to 11PM. The food was great, the cider was great (5% alcohol), but we needed to get up to where the tents were and where we would be viewing the eclipse from before the local law enforcement halted traffic for the duration.
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The town of Fécamp from the top of the cliff overlooking the harbor. |
| Nothing escapes Agfa film |
Fécamp is a small town of about 18,000 people situated on the mouth of a small river on the northern coast of France. Like the British coast across the channel, the surrounding coast was a series of steep cliffs. We had to drive around the waterfront to get to the switchback road that would deliver us to the pastureland above the town. It was on this part of the drive that I finally realized just how many people were in town. It was raining slightly but in a small amphitheater that we passed which was opened to the sky, a "Big Band" was playing dance music and the people dancing were going wild. There were a couple of large balloons being bounced back and forth and one of those ballroom glitter balls was sparkling in the night. There also seemed to be a party on every corner.... with the same vendors that we thought we saw in town! Kathleen wondered out loud about who would clean up after everyone left and the town shrank back to its normal size. When we got to the top of the scarp, we stopped to look down at the town below. It didn't look normal with all of the lights for miles in a town that I would imagine should have been in bed by then.
In the dark, the camping/viewing area was hard to see. I assumed that since Robert had already been there, we were in good hands. It was a good assumption. He knew where the chalked off walking paths were, where the chalked off camping squares were, where everything was. We just unloaded our stuff and followed his lead. Kathleen, being the clotheshorse that she is, came dressed for Paris. This was a cow pasture on the Normandy coast and it had grown quite chilly. I could practically see that she was shivering in the night air so I was glad when we finally came to the campsite. The tent was up and our sleeping bags were in the tent. We bid hello and goodnight to all in the party and then crawled into the tent. It was midnight.
| There's more! Part II |
© S. R. Rackley IV Aug. 1999
All Rights Reserved
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