We have found the nicest people in France. They are all in Nimes. We got off the train in Nimes on our way from Barcelona to the Cinque Terre in Italy, planning to camp for the night. Unfortunately, this was a last-minute plan and we didn't have time to fully investigate the directions we got from google to the nearest camp site. The info desk at the station gave us a map and showed us how to get to the address we had written on a scrap of paper, but after a 30 minute walk we arrived at the door of a doctor's office. There weren't even lawns or patches of grass anywhere on the street, much less a campsite.
We asked the only people in sight where we could go for camping, and from their wide eyes and arm gesturing I gathered it was far away. They knocked on a window and a woman appeared. She invited us in and offered to call a cab to take us to the campsite, but said it was closed and we were too late to check in. We didn't want to pay for a cab and had an early morning train to catch, so we decided to walk to the address of the back-up campsite we had responsibly looked up (also on google). The woman showed us the route to the new address on the map, let us pet her cat for a little while, and gave us a bottle that she filled with strawberry-flavored syrup and water plus a whole box of sugar cookies! We were so touched that we momentarily forgot we had no place to sleep that night and skipped down the road towards option #2.
Another 15 minutes brought us to the office of a camping council. Not a campsite. And also closed. Now we were really stuck. It was almost dark and we prepared to fork out for a hotel we couldn't afford...if we could even find one. A woman came out of the door next to the camping council, and we asked her where we could find a cheap hotel. She responded in rapid French, took one look at our confused faces and piled us into her car to drive us. It turned out she was from Chile and we were able to explain our predicament to her in Spanish. She sweetly drove us around the entire town looking for a place cheap enough for us, and even said she would have taken us home and let us stay with her if her house wasn't full of animals and relatives.
In the end we found a cheap place near the station we had disembarked from a few hours before. Wandering around lost in foreign countries doesn't end in disaster as often as you'd think. Thank goodness for helpful strangers.
P.S. I am coming for you, google maps.
