IN WHICH OUR EPONYMOUS HERO IS DRIVEN TO NEAR MADNESS.
*may contain scenes of violence and unusually heavy petting*
I must say the one person I would have expected to be pretty whingy and moany after 7 or 8 hours driving with only a couple of food and poop stops wasn’t at all…and neither was B. Little Miss behaved so, so well throughout the entire journey that at some points we thought she’d actually escaped and was hitchhiking her way to a life of absinthe, poetry and expressionism. Tania on the other hand gets très grumpy if she doesn’t eat at regular intervals. Then again I just get grumpy and she has to deal with that constantly so I doff my hat to her.
By the way you can’t write that many words while the coffee’s on, I’ve had two pots (FRESHPOTTTTTTS) and am now on the cheap bière – yes it’s past midday and even if it weren’t (like yesterday) I don’t care, I’m on holiday.
Also I’ve just been assaulted by my wife, reading this over my shoulder and assuming because she saw her name and the word grumpy in proximity to each other that I am being mean. Told you she gets grumpy.
So 7 or 8 hours in (I forget precisely how much because we were having SO much fun..) little did we know that we had almost as much again left to go. Fortunately a fair chunk of this was uneventful; I managed to sleep for A WHOLE FORTY MINUTES while riding shotgun but the damned tolls kept appearing. Now as a British driver I am used to two types of tolls: one where you pay to go over a massive bridge or under a tunnel and one where you pay to get into “another country”. What i am unaccustomed to, since we pay our annual road tax, is stopping every few hundred kilometres to fork over a shed load of Euros. To be fair to the French, their motorways are awesome; not as good as Ze Germans but far, FAR better than our embarrassment of a road network. Nonetheless, it’s still a little galling (heh, see what I did there) to have to dump roughly €50 of our holiday cash on the “luxury” of driving your own car across a country.
Tolls and service stations aside the motorways of France are gleaming jewels. Far from the station in Belgium where my good friend Tom once stepped in a human poo. A HUMAN POO. Told you the Belgians were animals.
Not taking into account the two hour jam we’d encountered,, the half hour detour for a supermarket, another half hour once we found a Lidl (mmm Lidl) and a few unscheduled stops for nappy changes, snacking and beveraging, we found ourselves not arriving at 2000 as we’d envisaged but rather by 2000 we were still hours away and it was threatening to get dark. Add to this the fact that we had decided to do a little scenic route driving away from the toll road – a grand idea in theory as we were kind of sick of staring at armco and overtaking trucks, in practice not so much as it was adding at least an hour onto our ETA – and suddenly we were experiencing a glorious sunset from the middle of open fields. This, whilst stunning, was a little unnerving seeing as we really only had the France atlas to go on and were fast running out of real directions. Once out of Bordeaux we had one road to go before reaching the Landes region in Aquitaine where we would have to navigate through hundreds of acres of forest to reach our villa. Bordeaux was where we finally lost the sunlight..and where we spotted the first flashes of the approaching storm.
Tania was driving, as per her instructions that I navigate the final chunk owing to our not having any goddamn directions. I was doing my best to estimate which way was South and what towns would appear in which order to ensure we were heading in the right direction. Suddenly the road signs inexplicably change from Bayonne, our current heading, to Paris…definitely NOT the direction we wanted.
“crap it CRAPIT”.
15 or 20 minutes later we find our way back to the south road and count our blessings that nothing can stop us now. Cue the lightning. Now I wasn’t entirely aware that my wife has issues with thunderstorms. The very presence of them unnerves her. The flashing simulates migraines, which she suffers from infrequently yet badly. So while I’m staring at the sky in utter joy as it lights up every few seconds my darling wife is gripping the wheel (leather bound, one up from the entry level model thank you) almost hard enough to leave John Candy sized indentations in. You can FURTHER add to this the sight of thousands of 50 ft tall trees silhouetting around us every time a flash goes off. We made it to the villa at just before midnight and i swear if we’d had a bottle of vodka she would have necked it BEFORE changing B and putting her to bed, which she almost never does.
Now all we have to do is try and relax before the journey back home. Hopefully not too difficult with all this bière. The problem is, as I mentioned before, the weather isn’t exactly Saharan. It’s fairly overcast today but it’s also fairly changeable – I’m just ecstatic that I’m not at my desk pounding on a Blackberry. Villa photos and more to come when I edit this from home – we’ve been Internet free for almost 5 days now; I hope apes haven’t taken over Britain yet – Lib-Con coalition excepted.