The paved uphill one kilometer long at the end I was not expecting it …
I understood almost immediately that I would have to wait another day to see the North Sea which I like very much, the adverse wind stronger than yesterday, the usual roller coaster ride and the cold slowed me down since the beginning … there was a moment when I thought I could make it but a few wrong roads took me back down to earth …
In these days I met many gypsies’ caravans, beautiful caravans, always in groups … in Lons I read that they had been chased from some camps … nobody wants them, not even on Romania … yet when I was little and used to live at the corner between via Cuttica and corso Toselli in Legnano sitting on the balcony of one of the windows of the sitting room I spent hours watching them arrive and go to the square of the fair … they used to pass twice because they could not cross … I liked the long deluxe caravans Tabbart pulled by Mercedes … it was a contact with a different world which gave me a sense of freedom …
Yesterday morning I read about the sentence Apple against Samsung, and vice versa, I prefer the Koreans I like the commercial approach they have in Africa, I like the ad campaign ‘thought for Africa’ with Drogba … Apple is more for uptight ones … in the afternoon as I was busy with what in Sudan is called a ‘short call’ … I noticed in a puddle a Samsung Galaxy, with the broken screen, but working, with a sim card inside and a memory card of 8 GB … I thought of leaving it at the first police post … but yesterday evening the police next to my hotel was closed and this morning too … the first gendarmerie I found was closed, the second one too … in the third I tried to ring the ball but alas what answers is a registration of a sort of national police call center … no sign of life … I was about to go when I saw a kind of big post box of the gendarmerie … I put it there … hopefully it will not end up in the hands of the French cousin of the Egyptian policeman who stole my speedometer!
On Sundays the towns are almost deserted!
Mainly in the afternoon finding somebody to whom to ask for directions is a serious problem … moreover at the same traffic light in two minutes, first a woman and then a man refused to open the window and talk to me …
So many war cemeteries!
Of World War One with French soldiers fallen under German fire, of World War Two I saw cemeteries and monuments at the memory of English soldiers, Australians, Irish, American, Canadian and from the Commonwealth! Up to not long ago we were not very different form some African states … we were beating one another hard … today we are united and have the Euro … in my opinion to defend at all costs …
Cassel is a fabulous town that you reach after a paved uphill … we are in the French Flanders after all … since very little was missing to nine closing time of restaurants in these small villages … I rushed uphill … pushed by hunger … on top I found an extraordinary pot of mussels … which I ate accompanied by the singing of my four neighbors … stopped only by their smoking breaks … at the end I congratulated them … they were thrilled …
Saint Quentin N 49° 84.578’ E 3° 28.412’ – Cassel N 50° 80.006’ E 2° 48.623’
151 km