July 5 Toulouse

I wake up outside. Everyone is around me, which means they either aborted their plan to sleep by the pool in the lawn chairs, or got busted. Turns out both are a little bit true: there was a moat around the gate to the pool that thwarted our inebriated would-be-intruders, and then the camp security discovered the clan and took Snail’s I.D. to guarantee that we pay for our stay in the morning.

So we dust ourselves off and make our way back to the beach for a final goodbye. As we stand on the sand, we watch a man boogie board down the dune. The guy obviously thought more about how to balance the entire way down than how to stop at the bottom, and he crumples and disappears into a cloud of sand. He’s somewhere at the bottom of that picture.

After a couple hours, we wind into Toulouse, and it’s a hilarious French dream. Buildings are capped with Spanish tiles and quaint cafes made of stone and mortar bump up against each other, all adorned with striped, smoking girls. I find a lizard on the bridge, and I just want to reach down and adorn him with a little beret.

Antoine and Mickey Mouse (apparently that’s what Fish Bone named her when she was their tour manager, and I can’t find any reason to stop. She has nicknamed me Couer Savage.) are our hosts/caretakers for the night. They make sure we have way, way too much to eat, and eventually, to drink.

I am amazed to see that it is actually called Bud over here as well. Ah, copyright infringement.

The stage is done up in mirrors, and the night proceeds accordingly. Which of course means the club goes nuts and the crowd joins BBE on stage to do the twist, among other things.

Antoine takes us back to his place to crash. Well, most of us. Zach stayed behind to party his face off. And so the rest of us have a good laugh about how drunk he is and where he’s going to wake up as we roll into our lodging. It’s a farm out in the countryside, and although charming, there is a faint sense of horror movie in the air. The night ends with the bathroom light flickering in some sort of poltergeitic Morse code. I wonder if a pig with red eyes will be visiting my dreams tonight?