… like as good a night’s sleep last night. But that’s because the bed collapsed in the middle of the night. I thought that it was all too good to be true. I carried out a few hasty repairs and we’ll have to see what that gives. I hope I can make it home without too much trouble – much as I love Caliburn, I don’t want to sleep for the next few nights in his cab.
So after breakfast I headed off to Troyes again and lost my way again. But in the end I did manage to work out how come. Troyes is actually two centres – the old original centre and the newer Medieval centre, and they each have a ring road and so it’s like a figure 8 – and that’s what makes it so complicated.
After much ado, I ended up back where I had left Caliburn yesterday as parking there is free, so another motorist told me. I may just as well have stayed there last night for all the good my meaderings did me.
And what a beautiful place it would have been to stay, too. If this is the kind of thing that you see at a free car park, just imagine what it’s going to be like in the touristy bit.
And if they call Chalons the “Venice of Champagne”, what on earth do they call Troyes? Because it has 10 times as many water courses flowing through it and they are all much more impressive than what you see at Chalons.
Where I parked Caliburn was right by a canal of course, and this view , the quai de la Prefecture, is only a few hundred metres away
Troyes though is a fascinating city and it’s probably one of the prettiest places to visit if you are, like me, a fan of medieval architecture.
There’s all kinds of wooden wattle-and-daub half-timbered houses here and it’s very easy to picture Coventry as looking like this in the 1920s before the planners and the Luftwaffe started to become involved in Coventry’s development.
But as you see, the presence of old medieval architecture hasn’t interrupted the modern progress of Troyes, despite what Donald Gibson (ptah!) might have told us.
What Gibson and his planners did to Coventry in the name of “progress” was nothing short of criminal when you consider how other cities have successfully integrated their historic buildings into modern 20th-Century lifestyles.
As well as the Cathedral, Troyes has dozens of other churches including this one, the Basilique de St Urbain.
The Urbain in question is he who went on to be Pope Urban IV. He was born here – not in the church but in a house on the site of the church. His remains were brought back here in the 1930s and interred in the choir but I couldn’t find any trace of this, and the woman who was on duty here knew nothing, and gave the impression that she didn’t really care either – much more interested in her book.
But just a word here. You’ve seen three or four photos of Troyes. I took about 60 and I could easily have taked three or four hundred. For a lover of medieval architecture and half-timbered buildings, the city of Troyes is a paradise and should not be missed for any reason at all.
Not too far out of Troyes at the village of Souligny is a sign for the site de Montaigu. Montaigu is French for “steep hill” and they weren’t joking either because it was. It’s another oppidum and castle and although the earthworks are well-preserved, there’s nothing left of any building.
Even more annoying, there isn’t anything in the way of interpretive sign to tell you what it was that was here and you are left to resort to guesswork.
There’s something else to add to our list of accomplishments on this journey.
Here at Le Cheminot, a Macedonian living in Italy had a flat battery on his Bulgarian lorry that was towing a Belgian trailer through France (so hooray for globalisation) and so Caliburn and I had to give him a jump start. Good old Caliburn.
But while all of this was going on, we talked about life in Macedonia. He told me that things were much better under Tito – there was work and everyone had some money and some kind of future but now, rampant capitalism has taken over, there’s an immensely rich minority in the country and everyone else is poor and there’s a pile of unemployment. Life in Macedonia is bad. He’s not the first to say this kind of thing to me, and I’ve seen much of this with my own eyes. Communism had its good points as I have said before, just as I have said that Capitalism can in many cases be evil.
And I’m having an early night tonight. The flaming gas has run out halfway through cooking tea.
