Club75 🥳🤠 | Region Nord in France and TGV to Marseille

While making the trekking from Poland to Spain in 2017, we (me, my husband, and our dog who unfortunately passed away recently) crossed the Belgian-French border in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by corn on the cob and practically nothing else. We were fulfilled with hope, believing that we will be able to supply ourselves with the food soon (in Belgian villages it was quite challenging to find any store). After a while, we reached the first town and discovered why the Nord province has a poor reputation in France.

We stopped at the second or third house from the border, hoping that someone would fill our immortal plastic bottles with water once again. We used to refill bottles with tap water to lower our carbon footprint and not produce extra trash.

I didn't want to smile and ask people for something again, Krzysiek neither, so we were staying in the middle of the road and debating who should knock on the door and talk this time. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a chubby man without the shirt appeared and stared at us uncomfortably. Well, since we already had an audience, it's worth taking advantage of it, I thought. We headed straight to the guy, smiling and asking about the languages he speak. Of course, as usual in France, he did not speak English or at least did not want to admit it (French and Brits rather don’t like each other)

_{Me and Bestia, our dog - Nord, France}

My French is as bad as two-day-old bread from the supermarket, I barely know 50 words that I have learned in high school, but it was enough to explain what do we need. Happily, I have noticed that the guy took our bottles and asked us to follow him to his home at the end of the street.

Near the backyard gate, he asked us to wait a moment and took… the rifle that he had prepared there (!!). He came back with the water and did not want any money from us. As it occurred, he thought we are the burglars and he was ready to react using riffle if he would see us doing something suspicious! I don’t know what burglars are robbing houses with the backpacks and dog on the leash, in the middle of the day, but honestly, knowing that someone was ready to shoot at us, scared me a lot.

It is wonderful that everyone we asked for water in Europe willingly handed it to us. Unfortunately, sometimes people were insisting that we should accept mineral water bottles. Great gesture, but against all that we wanted to achieve. We could buy our mineral water, we were asking for tap water for ecological, not economical reasons. My French was a bit too weak to explain it well though.

The Nord region is the region of France that reminds me a lot of eastern Europe. There is a lot of agriculture here, very rural landscapes, an ethnically undifferentiated society, and very few tourists. Even though France is the most visited country by tourists in Europe.

Finally, we spent three days in the north, walking from one village to another and enjoying the taste of baguettes. Okay, these baguettes were not so easy to get. It turned out that in France, unlike in Belgium, there are stores in small towns, but due to the upcoming Bastille Destruction Festival - all of them were closed at that time. On our first day, we were lucky to find a barely opening (one hour during the day!!) bakery. On the second, we were in a larger city, where there were fewer problems with supplies. However, we have noticed that France is monopolized with Carrefour. The stores of this chain are about 90% of all groceries we encountered on our way. I don't even want to think how potentially dangerous the monopoly on food supplies in the country is.

_{Look how skinny I was comparing to 2021}

Since we had already arranged the workaway a long time ago, we had very little time to get to Gósol in Spain, so we had to hurry up. We decided that we wanted to move faster. We rejected hitchhiking, as having the dog with us was making it very challenging to find the driver who would stop and take us all with them. We have decided to use another option, very french, very characteristic for that country – TGV. TGV is a superfast train with an average speed of 280 km/h. Financially it looked catastrophic. Cheap flights from Paris would be more economical, but we had had a dog, so the train was a much less problematic solution. We bought tickets online and started looking for the last night in the north.

The nearby lake looked very attractive on the map, so we decided to go that way, motivated by the perspective to bath in a reservoir instead of taking the shower under the bottle with water like we used to do while traveling away from civilization. We walked the whole day, and the last few kilometers we took a bus driven by a lovely lady. Well, she seemed to be lovely at first. The truck driver almost caused a collision with our bus, so the “lovely lady” opened the window and for 15 minutes was saying to him things that could not be repeated in a decent conversation. In a while, the whole bus started to help her and the truck driver was trying to defend himself by being rude as well so we were stuck in the middle of the verbal street fight better than from the Eminem biography movie…

_{Plenty of mosquitoes but it was worth the view. Morning breakfast on the lake coast}

The lake turned out to be a very marshy reserve. A good place to sleep, but it was impossible to bathe there or clean the clothes. We had plenty of problems with the mosquitoes and ticks, which in that part of the world are quite dangerous because they can give you Lyme disease. I got one of those ticks but my husband helped me to professionally remove it.

The next day we got into the TGV, which was fast as lightning, but visually monstrously unattractive. We were expecting crystal chandeliers, red carpets and a chocolate fountain for this price, but we got the quality of the cheapest train in Poland. The important thing is that we arrived in Marseille, just in time to sing Marseilles for the national holiday, which we planned to do all day, but then we fell asleep exhausted by the travel.

_{Marseille was the real start of the trekking for us - from here we basically walked to Gosol 95% of the distance}