We’d been riding in the bus for about an hour, paralleling the Seine on a river road that ran arrow straight through a broad flood plain. Barges and small cargo vessels plied the waters to our left, while to our right, a forest of young hardwoods marched to the base of a ridge of limestone cliffs. As we veered inland, the landscape grew wilder and more lush, the roads narrower and more corkscrewed, turning the trip into a sightseer’s dream, but a carsick sufferer’s nightmare. I wasn’t sure where Krystal and Woody were sitting, but I sure hoped Krystal’s supplements were working, because unlike cruise ships or airplanes, buses furnished no motion sickness bags in their seat-back pockets. We drove through tiny French villages where the houses were completely flush with the road, save for a narrow strip of pavement that wasn’t even wide enough to wheel a pram. We passed fields that were leaf-green with ripening crops, meadows whose grass rippled toward gently rolling hills, ramshackle barns whose crooked clapboards were held together with spit and bailing wire, and formidable embankments that were surmounted by an impenetrable tangle of hedgerows and trees.
