On The Road - Chapter 1
Jack Kerouac eat your heart out.
We’ve been back in the Vendee for a few weeks now after our househunting trip down in the mountains, but I haven’t been able to post this blog entry as soon as intended as we’ve been waiting for the broadband man to sort us out, so apologies for the delay.
To do things a little backwards by summarising at the start, we’ve found a house and had an offer accepted on it, we’ve signed the compromis, and we’re now counting the weeks until we’re invited back down to sign the acte, which should be sometime early next year, so good news indeed, as long as we can figure out how to get snow chains on our hired removal van. Anyway, this is how it all happened….
We’d packed a good deal of celebrating into our last week at work, and had a lovely time with Squidge’s family the following weekend. But by the time we’d driven to St Pierre from St Malo on the following Monday, we were totally shattered, all the while struggling with a full Land Rover, thinking that it would let us down at any moment (at least I thought that).
Squidge’s momentous falling-off-the-veggie-bandwagon, which we’d planned for ages for the ferry, with her choosing the entrecote from the menu, was undoubtedly fun and interesting, as we both anticipated the outcome of each mouthful, but the lustre of the occasion may have been dulled somewhat by our tiredness. To date, incidentally, she doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects from her return to a carnivorous diet.
So all in all, it was a bit stressful, and in hindsight we probably tried to do too much in too short a period of time, but we got here safe and sound and unloaded a very grateful Landy, after which we had a whole day to unpack, take stock, and REST!
However, once again, after an all too brief break, but this time unladen other than with bedding, we headed south, taking lunch on the first day just north of Bellac. The first night was slightly complicated by the fact that, not long after parking at our initial campsite next to the Dordogne in Souillac, and just as we were about to open a bottle, we were told we couldn’t stay there as it was closed for winter. Fortunately, I’d already managed to take a shower (lovely warm water for a closed campsite), so although it was an inconvenience I felt relatively refreshed as we upped sticks and travelled the short distance south to Payrac in a downpour, where, after seeking advice from its friendly, if incomprehensibly heavily-patoised boulanger, we found a small campsite run by a Dutch couple, and settled in the back of the motor for the night under our blankets, amid the trees under a clearing sky.
The next morning, we planned to lunch somewhere just north of Toulouse, as part of what we thought would be a nice easy day, arriving in St Girons at 4ish. This confident assertion was predicated on a growing confidence in the reliability of our lovely Land Rover, and thus we left the campsite, with me actually settling back into the driving seat rather than being hunched over the steering wheel gripping it in readiness for one of any number of perceived imminent motoring disasters.
And then, a whole eight kilometres down the road to Cahors, we heard what sounded like a helicopter approaching and flying very low right over us, but of course it wasn’t - it was a flapping, flipping punctured front pneu.
OK, we thought, a minor inconvenience that won’t cost us any money, we’ll just jack the boy up, fetch the spanner and socket set from the back, replace the wheel and get a new tyre when we get back to the Vendee. However, having searched among the various layers of bedding, it became apparent that the spanner and socket set was back at the farmhouse, and as warm and cosy as our bedding was, it was entirely useless at removing the nuts from our stricken wheel.
It was at this point that our luck changed, and held, for the rest of the day. A couple of those orange local authority vehicles were crawling along the other side of the road, seemingly assessing whether the hedges needed trimming or not. Having realised that we were in le merde to an extent, I flagged them down without really knowing how they could help, but they stopped, listened to our predicament and sympathetically nodded and hmm’ed when they could easily have laughed out loud at our stupidity. Then, after they’d each enthusiastically, manfully and, in one case womanfully, had a bash at removing the wheel with their singularly inappropriate hedge-styling equipment, the senior hedge-height assessor leapt into his van and drove off to the local garage to fetch the mechanic.
After a convoluted and slightly surreal passing-the-time-while-waiting-for-the-mechanic conversation about McDonalds vs French cuisine, Northampton, English beer and the engine size of the Land Rover with the residual hedge assessors (one of whom spoke the same impenetrable Midi-langue as the boulanger), a BMW screeched to a halt next to us. Ah, the mechanic, we thought, although we were surprised by the mode of transport. But no, it was Charlie (name changed to protect the bumptious), an Englishman abroad, scarily keen to help his countryman and woman, especially as he had crossed Australia in a Land Rover a few years back, replacing something like 857 tyres in the process. Confused by Charlie’s arrival and the developing situation, the hedge assessors departed, slowly, down the road, replaced in moments by the mechanic, who was equally nonplussed by Charlie’s role in the whole scenario, especially when l’anglais leapt underneath Landy and alongside the mechanic as he jacked it up, bellowing at us from his prone position about the benefits of inflatable jacks.
After a while, as Charlie, the car and the baffled-yet-heroically-stoic mechanic consummated their ménage a trois, the flat was replaced with the spare, and we drove off to the garage for a new inner tube in convoy: us and Landy, the mechanic in his little Suzuki, and Charlie, bringing up the rear in his BMW, anxious to impart advice upon arrival at the garage, and keen to keep a close eye on the shifty Frenchies, lest we were ripped off, poor young innocents that we were.
This soap opera was acted out over the course of the morning, so that on arrival at the garage, all work stopped for midday and lunch. The mechanic sloped off home, Charlie, with a screech of tyres, departed, ironically for the Pyrenees and Pau, and we were left with two hours to kill in the middle of nowhere.
But by 2.30pm, we were back on the road, five hours delayed, several euros lighter, but undoubtedly richer for the experience, and after a blissfully uneventful remainder of the day, we arrived in St Girons well before dusk.