Bonsoir Mes Amis...
Yep, I'm back and now I've caught up with work (yawn) et al I thought I'd update you with tales of my sojourn to France in order to visit The Money Pit. A lot happened during my 8 day stay (extended from 7) and it would be an inordinately huge post to cover all the observations I made about what we've bought and where we've bought it. So. I'll do it over a few posts starting today.
The site itself is a place called La Carabasse near a town called Vias virtually bang on The Med. I would think the nearest places people would readily recognize are Beziers and Montpellier. We set off on the Friday about 18:00 to cater for the undoubted huge amounts of traffic that would be clogging the main artery of London travel, the M25. Our train through the tunnel was booked and we were on the 23:45 from Dover and would be in the quaint (sic) little French port of Calais for 23:20 local time. Yes, even now looking back it seemed that 5 hours journey time for a 122 mile trip from home to the tunnel was being a little over cautious. Hence, when we arrived at the tunnel at 21:00 we were slightly perturbed by the idea of a near 3 hour wait. But we needn't have worried. In a fit of brilliant and efficent bureaucracy and design when I put the debit card into the "self check in area" fully in the expectation that ......
a.) my card would fail
b.) the booking details would be lost
c.) The booking had never been registered
d.) I am unknowingly wanted by the Police and they would turn up and nick me
e.) any other number of mishaps, failures or errors might occur
.......everything was fine. The bloody system even asked if we would like to travel earlier for no charge!. It offered us a crossing at 21:30, less than 10 minutes from arrival at the port. Again, more in hope than expectation we opted for the earler journey, after we had a non-stop drive the length of France in front of us through the night, so why not start early? And I have a mouth full of metal preventing me from talking so I'm constantly grumpy. In fact without trying to be un-PC.....I sound at times like someone who is partially deaf such is the difficulty I have pronouncing "S", "C", "ch", "sh" and oddly enough "J", "T" and "G". Wow, even this worked and so we followed the lane signs and within 5 minutes we were on the shuttle. To say I was amazed that any form of group travel could be this efficient was an understatement to say the least. Then, just to cap off the now astounded Jack mind the damn train left bang on time and arrived bang on time, and so we were in France at around 21:00 local time. It was all I could to stop myself surrendering at the French "Douane" and asking for a drug test just in case I was hallucinating under the influence of a mind bending drug I'd covertly had administered. We were on the road by about 21:30 local time.
But of course this blissful journey couldn't last. We drove from Calais to Paris down the French A1, a magnificent 4 lane highway of virtually no cars. I kept a steady 110km/h as it was raining and I didn't fancy getting a french speeding ticket as a souvenir. GMD dozed, the kids slumbered. The journey is around 200 miles, but of course on a map it looks like about an inch and a half (4cm for those living in Metric reality). Naively I decided that because we were in Paris quite late at night I would be able to drive straight through the centre out to the South side. Yeah, right. For the uninitiated, and that no longer includes me, Paris is a nuthouse. Its a lunatic asylum full of people driving how they like, on roads with no signs, with one way systems that would be physically impossible to draw, in cars that mainly have a bit missing somewhere from a previous prang. It is not for the fainthearted and even the most confident and gobby cocksure London cabbie would feel threatended and intimidated by driving Paris. I will NEVER do that again. NEVER. EVER. The only time I will be in a car in Paris is in the back of a cab. I also didn't know it had an interior "peripherique" and an exterior "peripherique". As we turned down road after road hopefully looking for a sign to somewhere we knew of any one of the spoke A roads, driving past hippies, dropouts, gangs, drunks, I could sense the worry developing from GMD and Teenager (Baby was fast asleep by now). Eventually GMD indicated a road to take. What she meant was pull over whilst she worked out which way to go....what i heard was take a left here .....and hence ensued the first holiday row over getting lost. This is a ritual that occurs every time we go to France. GMD thinks she can read a map but somehow or another we always end up at one stage driving round the same bits and getting nowehere. When we do find our way out she usually follows this up with
"I told you I knew where to go!"
Anyway, eventually we're out of Paris, grateful to be in one pice both physically and mentally. Honestly if you want to give people a real mental test then dump them in Paris and tell them to find their way out. You'd never see them agin, ever.
Eventually I gave up on the driving at around 6:00 when I genuinely started to hallucinate through tiredness and GMD, freshly rested took a stint for an hour and a half. We drove through the Tarn Gorges and the area of France that is like the Highlands of Scotland, stunning scenery, Italian Job tunnels in mountains, roads 1500m above sea level. It was truly a beautiful drive, topped off by the magnificant Viaduct De Millau, sitting some 750m above the town of Millau. In the UK the environmentalists would be up in arms about spoiling the natural scenery but belive me, this Bridge enhances that scenery and is a true icon of just how man can build things that rival natures beauty. Magnificent. And a snip at 5 Euro's to cross!
Some 12 hours after leaving the train we arrived at the Holiday Parc, the weather mild but cloudy. And then we saw, for the first time, The Money Pit........
to be continued.........
Later, GrocerJack
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