September 21, 2024 to September 22, 2024
Moulins
We’re awakened early - before six sometime - by a phone call. This is very unusual, as we rarely get phone calls - everyone knows to contact us by email. Our reaction is to ignore it and check our voice mail later, but Rachael sees from the caller ID that it’s dad. This is a really rare event, rare enough that it’s alarming. I think the last time was when he called on my birthday last December. And I very seldom call him either, because it’s so difficult both to make the connection with him (he usually has his hearing aids off and can’t hear the phone) and to communicate. He’s gotten very hard of hearing and can’t really understand what I’m saying so once he figures out who’s calling it’s mostly a matter of listening while he produces a stream-of-consciousness ramble of random unrelated thoughts.
So of course we take the call, because there may be an emergency. And it sounds like there is, as we both listen with alarm on the speaker phone. It takes a minute until he understands who I am - at first he asks if I’m my brother Stewart, so I suspect he dialed me by mistake. Our names both begin with S, so maybe they’re adjacent in his contact list.
Dad’s calling because he’s scared. He’s just wakened up from a nap, it’s dark, and he’s disoriented. He doesn’t know where he is and doesn’t know what he should do. Eventually I get across that after I get off the phone I’ll call Elizabeth or Stewart, because they’re the ones that can do something. I tell him to just sit or lie down and wait for a call from one of them, tell him I love him, and hang up.
So I immediately call Elizabeth, and fortunately it’s still early enough in the evening back there that her phone hasn’t started sending callers to her mailbox for the night yet. We have a long conversation about dad. She’s not at all surprised by this development, because it happens frequently now. The only surprise is that I got the call instead of one of them. He’s in a good progressive care facility so there are resources on site but for whatever reason he reaches for a phone to call someone in the family first.
Because the sad fact is that dad is well along into dementia now. There were signs of this coming over the last year at least, but he’s deteriorated considerably since we last saw him over the winter. She says that even though he has his good days and bad days he really doesn’t remember anything from one visit to the next. We agree that if he dials me again by mistake I should just ignore the call and then let her know. I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t remember or recognize either of us when we see him again. It makes for a very sad and sobering start to the day.
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It’s another travel day, and finally we score some more biking miles again! Adding in today’s short half-mile ride to the Tours station and then from the Moulins station to our hotel there, we’ve run up eight miles in the last six days - better than a 1 mpd average!
Conditions are fine for the ride to the Tours station. We leave our lovely apartment for the last time a half hour before departure and arrive at the station just as the departure gate has been announced. Our train is in the station already so we head straight there, wheel the bikes on, hang them up, and take our seats. Nothing easier.
It’s roughly a three hour journey. For the first half as we go east along the Loire progress is fairly slow with frequent stops; but once we turn south they become infrequent, and the fast train races south through gradually more open country. Windows into attractive scenes - fields with cattle, broad expanses of sunflowers still in bloom - open up frustratingly briefly in the infrequent windows through the trackside wall of green. Too fleeting to get any sort of decent shot really, which of course doesn’t prevent me from trying.
There are only two other things to note about the journey. First, there’s a moment of panic when I ask Rachael to look at our tickets on the SNCF website to remind me of our ETA so we’ll know when to start getting ready. It will be a brief stop because the train continues on beyond, so we want to have our bikes down off their hangers in advance. The panic comes when we decide we’ve boarded the wrong train, and are going to Lyon instead. I start frantically researching to see if there’s a train from Lyon to Moulins this afternoon that takes bikes, but then we realize she’s looking at the wrong ticket - she’s looking at the next one, the ride from Moulins to Nimes we’ll take three days from now. So there’s a big sigh of relief and then we relax again until it’s time to disembark in a half hour.
There are only two other things to note about the journey. First, there’s a moment of panic when I ask Rachael to look at our tickets on the SNCF website to remind me of our ETA so we’ll know when to start getting ready. It will be a brief stop because the train continues on beyond. The panic comes when we decide we’ve boarded the wrong train, and are going to Lyon instead. I start frantically researching to see if there’s a train from Lyon to Moulins this afternoon that takes bikes, but then we realize she’s been looking at the wrong ticket - she’s looking at the next one, the ride from Moulins to Nimes we’ll take three days from now. So there’s a big sigh of relief and then we relax again until it’s time to disembark in a half hour.
The other thing to note is the interactions of this utterly adorable toddler and his/her (we had different reading’s of the child’s gender) interactions with his attentive and adoring parents. Rachael told me about how charmed she was by them when she returned from the bathroom, but then when we return to our bikes we find the family sitting there in the open space at the end of the car letting the child wander around for a few minutes. The parents are very nice, and the man helps me pull down both of the bikes. Afterwards I look at the remaining bikes and see that they must be on bikes also. Two of the three remaining have a trailer propped up between them.
Eventually they return to their seats, and a minute later we see her (Rachael insists it’s a girl so we’ll go with her reading) peeking at us from beneath her father’s legs outstretched to the seat across the aisle. Really, watching this child is the high point of the day. In my mind, this and the conversation with dad put poignant bookends on the circle of life.
We arrive, we get off, we bike a mile to the Ibis Styles hotel we’re booked at. I take an instant liking to the city as we bike through it, a place I’m not sure I’d ever heard of before researching for a route south. I plan to come back and walk around after we’ve checked in to our room, because the weather is fine for the next few hours and tomorrow is due to be a total rainout.
There’s a humorous misunderstanding when we check in at our hotel. I tell the receptionists we have bicycles so she gives us the keys to the bike room and the directions - around the corner and up the alley. When we get there we see a row of rooms, one of which has a bicycle icon above it and another for motorcycles.
The key doesn’t fit. Rachael suggests I try the motorcycle room, but I don’t think that makes sense so I turn to go back to the hotel when I see our receptionist walking across the parking lot toward us. She’s been watching us on the CCTV and sees what happened. I said we had bikes, so she gave us the keys to the motorcycle room. I’ll need to remember to say we have velos in the future so there’s no confusion.
I’d thought I’d go back out again right away, but I’m tired and a nap sounds more to the point. We don’t leave the room until seven when we walk a few blocks to Valentino’s for dinner. Afterwards I stop for at least one shot of the town, but by then of course the light’s gone and it’s too late. Hopefully we’ll get some kind of break tomorrow, but if not there’s still the following morning because our next train has an early afternoon departure.
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2 months ago
Today's ride: 2 miles (3 km)
Total: 3,801 miles (6,117 km)
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2 months ago
Don't be too sure your dad won't recognize you next time you see him. I've been dealing with my dad's dementia for a couple years now, and though he can't remember much beyond vague thoughts about his boyhood home, and he's well beyond remembering how to dial a phone, he always recognizes his sons right away. Also, my grandmother had Alzheimer's, yet she always recognized and remembered the name of her son (my dad.)
My dad is clearly in a different world now, but I always get something rewarding from my time with him.
2 months ago