Train Platforms of the Loire Valley

My journey to the Loire started with an early, bleary morning.  I rose at 4 am in the dead stillness of the Parisian apartment my girlfriends and I rented from Air Bnb.  I'd met them seven years earlier when we'd converged on the city for an au pair year.  Several of them I hadn't seen since I'd said goodbye along the banks of the Seine six years ago.  We'd scattered back to our homelands like boomerangs (I shot out to China before coming back to Tennessee) in Geneva, Dublin, London, Atlanta.  Now I was back in France, and my mission was to meet winemakers, but I'd sent out an impulsive query to see who would meet me in Paris beforehand, and was delighted when I was met with a resounding YES from each girl.
The bed and floorboards creaked as I rolled out next to Veronica and gathered my things.  I'd said goodbye  the night before.  We had drunk wine and eaten cheese until around 1 am when, with drooping eyelids, I hugged them all and left them watching Broad City.   I'd decided back in Tennessee to get the 6 am train ticket to Saumur from Paris.  Now it seemed the height of stupidity on roughly three hours of sleep.

I headed down the spiral staircase and into the dark street towards the metro.  As I got down the steps into the station I realized my three-day unlimited pass had expired and I had no coins to buy a ticket.  The subway worker I flagged down to help me clearly hadn't had her morning cafe creme.  She was incredulous that I had no coins and was incapable of making change, and shrugged in exasperation when my bank card didn't work in the machine.  She disappeared behind a metal door.  Panic rose in my throat.  I had to make my train.  I stumbled out of the metro and into a taxi.  We threaded through the dark streets of Paris, me nervously watching the meter since I only had twenty euros in cash.  Despite my stress the luxury of this cab wasn't lost on me.  When I'd lived in Paris as an au pair I'd never dreamed of taking a cab.  The au pair stipend was more pocket money than salary.  I used mine mainly for pints of Leffe and falafels consumed on curbs and riverbanks.

I got my ticket printed out from a machine in Montparnasse and found the platform.  We boarded in the crisp air.  I was leaving Paris, the city I felt I knew.  Though it was vast and I hadn't been there in years, there was still a resonance, memories that lent a familiarity and confidence as I threaded through its passageways.  Now I was going west to wine country, alone. 

I came into Saumur in the grey morning, around 8 am.  As I came into the tiny station and tried to get my phone to pull up internet, I realized I had made a grave error.  My rental car was waiting for me several stations back, in Angers, but I had come to Saumur, where I would be staying the next four nights.  I had fudged the details.  Somehow in the orchestration of the trip months before, late at night at my kitchen table, I conflated Angers and Saumur, and thought the Enterprise-Rent-A-Car was in the same place as my Air bnb.

A taxi would be out of the question in this case.  The next train would come in three hours.  I got a bitter cafe and a croissant at the bakery across the street, then ambled back into the station and out onto the platform in the fresh air.  I wrapped myself in my sweater, brushing off greasy shards of croissant, and lay down on the row of seats.  I dozed fitfully, waking up to sun streaming full on my face.  I was sweating.  When I'd left Paris before dawn I could see my breath.  Now I pulled off both my sweaters with only my linen shirt underneath, looking around for shade to escape sunburn.

I kept coming into the station to watch the platform announced for Angers, to make sure I had the right time, the right place.  I descended the ramp into the station, lugging my heavy bag.  I waited, sitting on my suitcase, reading my book, The History of Love.  A old woman with white hair approached me, asked if this was the train for Angers.  

"Oui, cette train, c'est pour Angers," I assured her.

The train came.  We boarded.  I watched the platform roll away, and give way to houses with tiled roofs, laundry hanging out to dry.  Fields flashed by, little rivers.  We approached another town, and a fairytale chateau could be seen through the trees, with turrets and minnerets.  With each town, I got a sick feeling in my stomach.  Angers should only have been a few stops away, maybe a twenty minute ride.  But as the train ride stretched into thirty minutes, then longer, it became clear I had made another mistake.  The train terminated in Tours.  Weary and distraught, I called the first winemaker on my agenda, Pierre-Jean Sauvion, to tell him I had taken the train in the wrong direction, and I didn't think we could meet up today.

"I am so sorry for you!" he exclaimed.  "You should have just gotten the train to Nantes, and I could have picked you up from the station!"

We agreed to try to sort out another rendezvous in the next couple of days.  I was on the phone with the front desk lady at Enterprise, trying to convince them to hold my automatic-transmission car for me.  I went into the ticket office and tried to make myself understood.

"Je suis aller a Saumur.  Le prochaine train a Saumur...?"  

The woman behind the counter crisply rattled off the times.  I struggled to make my brain comprehend military time in French and reached for a pen and a piece of paper.  

"Uhh, ecris s'il vous plait?"  
17:30
(Moi:) "Ah, 17:30 c'est pour Angers?"
(Madame de Train:)  "Oui madame!"
(Moi:)  Merci beaucoup!

I stepped outside into the bright warmth outside the station.  The greasy croissant and coffee hours earlier wasn't cutting it.  I needed a phone charger.  Maybe there was a cafe nearby where I could get sustenance for myself and my cell.

I came down the cobbled sidewalk with my rolling suitcase, the sun streaming down.  People hustled in and out of the station, boys stood in clusters, laughing and teasing each other.  Everyone was in limbo, waiting for a train or for one of the buses idling outside the station.  In a light-headed limbo I headed toward a square across the street.  Its pathways were made of pale fine gravel my suitcase wheels stalled in, skidding.  I hoisted it up and sat down on a bench.  Beech trees towered overhead and the wind tossed the lacy green leaves like curtains, green and gold in the sun.  
 

I sat in a little cafe and drank another tiny coffee and a sparkling water, my new French regime.  They seemed to be between food services, and I didn't have very much time before I had to make my way back to the station.  
On the train to Angers, the sun still bright in the late afternoon sky, I settled in with my book. charging my phone in the armrest charger.  A whole day lost to trains, threading back and forth across the green fields of the Loire.  The vineyards I yearned to see were somewhere out there, past the chateaus and village clotheslines.