As usual, in these difficult situations, your friends step
up and though he was loathed to leave the manic, Metro and manifestations of
Paris for even a day, Dan (see many Paris posts) gamely sacrificed himself for a blokes’ road trip.
Having only passed my driving test at the end of March, it
seemed somewhat of baptism of fire taking on a 550-mile run from Le Havre to Gimbrede in the Gers region. This
apprehension could have been compounded by a virtually sleepless night on the
ferry but once I’d slipped back behind the wheel and rolled back onto terra
firma, genuine excitement kicked in and I was soon speeding (to coin a phrase Mum!) along the immaculate autoroute toward Paris.
The reason why French roads are so good is because the money
from the tolls (peages) is ploughed straight back into road improvement. That
being the case, the A13 between Normandy and Paris was the best-kept motorway
anywhere! 5 (FIVE!) peages in less than two hours and almost €20 Euros later, I rolled up to the RER
(suburban railway) station in Poissy to pick up my friend and traveling
companion.
Having basically been on the go for 12+ hours, I was happy
to let Dan take the first stretch and after keying ‘Gimbrede’ into the sat nav.
(more on that later) we were soon out of the capital’s gravitational pull and
rolling south to the sounds of Fleetwood Mac (some music is just made for the
road!). The road trip had begun in earnest. Two mates, shooting the breeze and clocking up the miles, this was more like it!
It’s a cliché and an inaccurate one at that, to say that French
food is better than British. However, one area where those pesky stereotypers
may have a point is motorway munchies. A crunchy, seeded baguette filled with
slabs of rare roast beef, with crisp salad and a creamy horseradish relish,
followed by a moist, tart blackcurrant pastry and a drink, for less than €10 or
a Big Mac? Hmmm!
French is a remarkably descriptive language. Take the term
‘traffic jam’ for instance, a jam made of traffic, makes no sense, does it?
Well, now take the French word for it ‘un bouchon’ or ‘a cork’; stopping up the
road, not letting anything through, yep, I can see that. Well, whatever the
word, just short of Orleans, we got stuck in an almighty one.
Not being in much of a hurry, went with the flow – or lack
of it – crawling along at roughly 2 miles an hour, chewing the cud and
humming along to ‘Don’t stop’. All joviality faded into front-staring silence
when, after an hour, the recovery vehicle, carrying the burnt out wreck of a
German-plated people carrier (replete with roof box no doubt laden with holiday luggage),
trundled past along the hard shoulder. It just didn’t bear thinking about...
The mood lightened somewhat as we hit the A20 and the sat
nav. registered 245 miles before our next change of road – this meant the
turning up into the Gers and our destination, our much needed holiday, was in
sight. As the miles ticked down though, we started to notice something odd. The
arrival time on the sat nav. couldn’t possibly be right. It wasn’t going to
take three hours to get from Montauban to Gimbrede, was it?
Indeed it wasn’t! Now, Dan, who was driving, had not been
down this way before and therefore, was trusting Sat-nav. Susan (or whatever
her name was). I, despite having done this road a lot with my folks, was too
lost in scenery changes, conversation and lack of sleep to notice when Susan
took us off the A20 at Brive and directed us west. By the time it had dawned on
me, we were already 50-odd miles off route without a clue where we were headed.
A brief stop to check the road map (always have one of these
handy) revealed that Susan, intent on showing us the beautiful towns and
countryside of the Limousin and Dordogne, was planning on taking us along the A89, off the
motorway at junction 15 to then meander down the French equivalent of an A road to
Bergerac and then on another to Agen. We were too far off route to head back to
the A20 now, so off we went. “Ah!” I said to Dan as we pulled out of the service
station, “Didn’t that big sign there just say that junction15 was closed due to
the Tour de France?”
Sure enough, said exit was a mass of cones and road
barriers, no going down there then. Susan quickly recalibrated and told us to
come off two junctions later onto the D709 to Bergerac (please note that the
longer the number, the smaller the road!). Off at 13 then…"12 miles to Bergerac" says Susan…"Road closed in 12 km, due to Tour de France" says road sign. Aargh!
I’ve never been a big fan of cycling, but this was taking the Michel!
A quirk of French minor road signage is that they’re turned
in a way so that you can only see them coming from one direction. If you’re
coming the other way and at speed, hard mimolet! Hence we never saw the
deviation notice until we’d steamed past it. Finding a place to turn, we found
it partially blocked by a load of cycling support vehicles. I wound my window down... However, now was
not the time to practice my French invectives, so it was back to the deviation.
By now, we were not the only ones who were lost. Susan had obviously
not been programmed with Le Grande Boucle’s race calendar and so, as soon as we
turned off the D709, she tried every way possible to get us back on it (this was
made only partially amusing by the fact she couldn’t pronounce any of the road
names). The combination of constantly recalculating sat nav. woman and
deviation signs appearing out of nowhere and often behind us, almost led to the
end of our trip.
Trying to ignore Susan and follow the deviations to
Bergerac - is it me or do sat nav. voiceovers become more irritable the more you ignore them? - we soon found ourselves on roads barely wide enough for the car, with
forest blocking views on either side. I was driving: tired, irritated and lost
in dreaming up an anti-Tour Facebook page, when Dan said "Stop". Not being with
it, I didn’t hear him, so he said it again, a bit louder, "Luke, stop". Still nothing. I’d
seen the deviation sign up ahead, so was going to bloody well follow it... "STOP!!!!" Dan yelled, just before I crossed the junction
into the path of a speeding black 4x4…
Screeching breaks, minor heart palpitations and quite a few
“Sorry I almost got us killed” (s) later, we crawled off again and finally, we
made it into Bergerac. Meandering our way through the town, we came to the
river Dordogne, where, in the shallows, several renovated sailing barges sat
wallowing gracefully in the early evening light. We were momentarily spellbound
and despite recent near-death
experiences, still having 70-odd miles to go and being at least and hour behind
time, the sight seemed to infuse us both with a sense of calm.
Compared to previous stretches, the route into Agen was
without incident until, once again, I noticed discrepancies between road map
and sat nav. Susan. We were still in town and she was telling us we had barely
5 minutes to go. We knew our gite was in the middle of nowhere and this was
certainly not that! Surely we needed to cross the Garonne and not head into the
outskirts of Agen town.
Another stop, another road map consultation and the
realisation that there was a suburb of Agen called ‘Gimbrede’. We had already
phoned ahead to our hosts, Sally and Ian, who had agreed to put back their
evening meal for us and now they were going to have to do so again. This was
starting to become embarrassing!
Leaving the main road after Agen though, much of what had
happened before was forgotten. The combination of light and landscape in this
part of the world is unlike any place I’ve ever been – I’ve written about this
before – and an awed silence fell on the car. “Do you feel like you’re away
from Paris now buddy?” In response, a gentle nod.
The ever-narrowing roads now began to take on the names of
the houses and homes that stood off them. Susan did her best with the
pronunciation, but by the time we approached our destination, tears of laughter
were rolling down our faces. Our favourite was definitely: “Loo Dit Gain dee Rozzas”, your guess is as good as mine!
The little hamlet of Gimbrede, total population 150, was a
welcome sight. There was still time to over shoot the gravel drive leading up
to the gite but after some 24 hrs on the road (since I’d left London the
evening before) we crunched through the gate to be greeted by a bouncing Harris
(Sally and Ian’s hungarian pointer) and the most welcome words ever spoken to a weary
traveller: “There’s a cold beer in the fridge.”!
Before joining our hosts for dinner, we took a quick pause
on the patio out the back of the Niche, the little stone cottage that was to be our base
for the next six days. It was surrounded by a two-foot high lavender hedge,
rolling fields of sunflowers spread into the distance and little copses of trees
dotted the hills up to a little fortified village, in which the lights had
just started to blink on. The only noise we could hear was the thrumming of bees
as they moved from lavender flower to lavender flower. I turned to Dan and
proffered my half-empty can, “Happy holidays, my friend.” He let out a long,
contented sigh and clunked his beer against mine. “Happy holidays indeed!”
Note: Here's a link to a French road map, to orientate yourself with the various roads and regions from this post:
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