So I mentioned that I had a story from lunch. As we were walking back across town from the landing field, I asked the boys what they wanted to have for lunch. Simon said, “Fries and a cheeseburger, the good ones at that one restaurant,” and Leo agreed.
I knew which one they meant. There’s a restaurant called L’Hydromel which is not only a restaurant but a meadery. (“Hydromel” is mead.) They were in business last time we came to Chamonix, and back then I ordered the tasting flight of six meads to try, which was fantastic, if you ever have a chance to taste six different meads at once I highly recommend it. There’s far more variation in flavor than you might expect.
We’d already had one meal there this week, and had discovered that they have the best French fries of anywhere in France, the sort you would get in a really good American bar and grill or maybe even an upscale place that has steak-and-fries. Deeply brown and crispy, salted. Proper fries. And they do a smashburger. Correctly. I was perfectly happy to return, so I texted to Mark to meet us there. We ordered sodas and burgers for the kids, a flight of liqueurs for Mark and me; I ordered a “berliner” sandwich; fries for everyone.
The wait staff we’ve had all the times has been really friendly, and when the waiter came by a bit later and asked how we were doing, I told him how the kids had just done their first parapente and so we were celebrating. He congratulated them, and also complimented my French, which always makes me feel good. I suppose the liqueurs had helped it along a little.
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The restaurant is in the pedestrian-only zone of Chamonix. It’s signed like this:
But for some reason, there was a car parked on the wide sidewalk, just in front of one of the big tree planters spaced along here and there in front of the stores.
And it was not an ordinary car. It was a cherry-red antique rally car.
Intriguing! It was the sort of thing one might expect that a store owner would pay to have in front of the store for a while to attract customers, maybe, if he sold aviator sunglasses or driving shoes. However, this car was parked in front of a lingerie boutique. Curious. Even curiouser, the car had a Louisiana license plate. What?
The car attracted attention. People were coming to look at it and take pictures. At one point in our lunch we overheard a conversation in accented English, between the two gentlemen who were having lunch at the table behind me and a passerby, and we gradually realized that the two gentlemen were the ones who had driven the car here and parked it.
The gist of this is that they were taking part in an annual navigational rally of historical vehicles (the Tour of Legends) over the weekend. They mentioned getting lost, and it seems they were mid-rally right now and had accidentally skipped a town and gotten to Chamonix too early. And decided to have lunch.
Anyway, they (one might have been French, I’m not sure, but one of them was Irish) were telling the young man on the other side of the fence, who was from Poland, about the history of said car. It is the Ferrari LM Sport which, driven by Piero Taruffi, won the Giro di Sicilia rally in May 1955. And now it’s a collector’s item, I guess. We never did hear why it has a Louisiana license plate.
At one point one of the gentlemen shouted over the fence at a woman who was taking pictures, because she came rather close to the car and he thought she might try to sit on it. “Touche pas, huh,” I said to him, but he did not think that was funny.
Mark went and took a few more pictures of the car to send to a Car Guy friend of his, who, he thought, might appreciate the photos. I hadn’t figured this out at this point, but Mark had come to the realization that this was an eight-to-ten-million-dollar car.
(Mark’s friend the Car Guy was suitably appreciative of the photos.)
Anyway, as the gentleman were coming to the close of their lunch, the waiter gently came by and indicated that they should look out in the street, where what should we all spy but three members of the municipal police, standing around and looking extremely put out by the existence, on the sidewalk, in the zone where no one is supposed to be driving anyway, not just a car but an Italian car with American plates.
Cue the gentlemen hastily getting up and going over to explain to the French police what in the world they thought they were doing parking there.
Mark found this whole situation excruciatingly funny, but he had to explain to me why it was so funny. “Because if you wanted to have this car park in your town in order to attract attention and people to the shops, there is no way you could pay anyone to bring it here. But now that it’s here they definitely don’t want it here, it’s only a nuisance. And also, what I think happened here is they wanted to have lunch in Chamonix but they didn’t want to leave the car somewhere they couldn’t keep an eye on it. But practically the whole town is a pedestrian zone. So they just decided to drive into the pedestrian zone and park the car on the sidewalk where they could see it from where they were eating. I don’t know why they thought they wouldn’t get in trouble for it.”
The waiter came by and I said to him, “I was asking myself how they got permission to park there! I suppose they just thought that their car was so cool” (I used the English word) “that no one would stop them?”
The waiter shrugged and said, “They’re being completely stupid. At this time of day, you can’t have delivery vehicles here, you can’t even drive a postal truck. And you definitely can’t park a private vehicle on the sidewalk like that.”
After discussing the situation with the police for a few minutes they realized they had to move the car. So they (I am not kidding) pulled out a set of vintage leather driving helmets with vintage driving goggles and shoved them down over their heads, at which point it started to feel like a scene directed by Terry Gilliam.
They climbed into the car and spectators started to back away, many of them (including Mark) recording the scene on their cell phones. “Attention!” one of them snapped, rather huffily, at the three cops who were all standing behind the car gesturing at him. “Attention à la fume!” As in, get out of the way or you are going to be eating my exhaust.
And then he attempted to start the engine, but it took a moment or two before it really turned over, which was perhaps a little anticlimactic for his taste, I don’t know. But he got it going eventually.
Anyway, Mark was so glad he had not hiked down the mountain, because he would have hated to have missed this, and without his help I would never have caught the significance. Maybe our older kids would have, since they spent a significant chunk of their childhoods bingeing Top Gear.
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