In which Mark returns a rental car in Marseilles and finds himself enduring a Homeric epic journey home to Cotignac

It occurs to me that if you skimmed the title of this post too quickly, you might have mistaken the word "Homeric" for "homoerotic." If so, you'll probably be disappointed when my story fails to deliver on that intriguing expectation. I can only imagine what you might imagine to be entailed by a homoerotic epic journey in Provence. Wild boar hunting in bondage gear, perhaps, accompanied by regular rubdowns with rosemary-infused olive oil, or something like that? Like I say, I can only imagine.

But no, my journey home from Marseilles was pretty much the opposite of erotic. And if it wasn't exactly Odysseyian, it was still unexpectedly long, circuitous, and fraught with frustrations. It began with a simple premise: After arriving in Cotignac with Quincy and the kids on Saturday, I would drive alone to Marseilles on Sunday to return our rental car, and then return myself home by train and bus. Train from Marseilles to Brignoles, I figured, and then the bus from Brignoles to Cotignac. Should be home sometime Sunday afternoon, I thought. But I thought wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. Not only was I not home Sunday afternoon, I wasn't even home by Sunday evening. And instead of spending Sunday night relaxing with my family as we settled in for our second night in our new home in Cotignac, I instead spend an almost completely sleepness Sunday night alone in Aix-en-Provence, tossing and turning in a strange and costly bed, lamenting my lack of serviceable language skills, obsessively revisiting the false assumptions and wrong turns that had characterized this unexpectedly challenging day, paranoiaically imagining another surreal series of obstructions that might surely strand me again tomorrow, and flipping through the pages of my phrase book in rueful preparation for these possible privations. I felt sure I might need to know how to say, in French, "You mean there is no service on Monday either?" and "I've lost my contact lenses and cannot see," and "Please stop the bus because the coffee I drank this morning has affected my bowels in a way I had not anticipated," and – of course – "I am humiliated."

What transpired that grim Sunday to have delivered me to such a desperate and sleepless lonely night in Aix? I won't bore you with the details. Instead, I'll just say that I learned a few things firsthand that I really should have anticipated in advance, had I been better prepared and less willing to blithely trust my own ignorant optimism. I learned that, in France, even international car rental offices are liable to be closed for a two-hour lunch break between 12:00 and 14:00. I learned that, despite the physical presence of a passenger train station in Brignoles, there is no train that actually reaches there from Marseilles. I learned that there are a surprisingly large number of bus companies in France, each of which is decidedly regional and highly circumscribed in its scope of operations, and none of which seems to know or care very much about where the other companies drive their buses to, or when they do it. Also, I learned that bus services tend to be severely curtailed on Sundays, and that some buses – like the one to Cotignac – don't run at all that day.

I don't know why I thought it might be easier than it was. I mean, I've traveled by cross-country bus plenty of times before, even in countries where I speak the language well, and it's rarely transparent or straightforward or stress-free. I don't know why I thought it would be any simpler while jet-lagged and linguistically impaired. There was a time, back when I was a cringingly un-self-conscious 19-year-old reader of Kerouac and Ginsberg, when I indulged in a peculiar affection for the grim uncertainty of long-haul bus travel – the monotony, the delays, the missed connections, the overnight layovers in fluorescent-lit way-stations in some cold unsavory section of a city I didn't know, while some surly janitor mopped the floor around a snoring drunk sleeping two seats away from where I madly scribbled an endless longhand letter to a girl I'd dated a couple of times and who had already told me she wasn't interested in dating me anymore, and who certainly wasn't interested in my ten-page tedious sophomoric screeds about fluorescent way-stations, surly janitors and snoring drunks. Yikes. What the hell was I thinking?

So, anyway, I spent the night in Aix – a town that hadn't figured into my plans at all when the day started – feeling like a failure, and trying to sleep but failing at that too. I tossed and turned as the dark night crawled by. I unendingly rehashed the day's disappointments. I anxiously imagined ever more outlandish mistakes and humiliations that I might have to endure when morning finally arrived. As I lay there wide-awake all night, thinking that this was about as miserable as I've ever felt, I actually found myself indulging in the cliche'ed thought that maybe this whole hellish experience was all just a bad bad dream.

Now, somewhere in there, even if for just a moment, I'd like to think that I was able to take a step back and enjoy a little perspective on what I was being forced to endure: A night in a quaint hotel just off the famously lovely Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence. For many people, I guess, that's not exactly a living Hell.

Oh, and I guess I should mention this too: Once Monday morning rolled around, everything went just fine. I was back in Cotignac in time for lunch with Quincy and the kids.