October 7

<Doom-and-Gloom by Matthew>

Oops, I gave it away. Today was not a good day. I've had a few good days in my time, and a few bad ones, and I like to think that I can quickly tell the difference. Today was a bad one.

Here is the garage where we got the solenoid wiring fixed. This helps get the starter going when you turn the key in the ignition. It's all very sophisticated I'm sure. So we left chez Didier sometime that afternoon, actually about 7pm. We had plans to drive down to Orleans and camp there overnight before moving on to Cannes the next day

In this picture am I:
a. phoning the local Chinese for a quick take-out?
b. making a trade with my stock-broker in Seattle?
c. calling the RAC (roadside assistance) with information about our breakdown?
d. all of the above?

Those of you who didn't answer with c., go to the back of the class. Alas, the van lost power, quite a bit of it actually, well all of it really, somewhere on Le Perifique around the West of Paris. Bringing the cellphone along was a really great decision.

I'm being brief with my commentary here because it really is too painful to talk about. Au-revoir Daisy. With a license plate with '666' we should have guessed. The photo on the right is me watching as some helpful Frenchman hauls our German-made, English-bought VW van onto his truck. It was probably about 9pm by now ;-(

Et voila, le voiture est sur le truck

We got a ride to some hotel somewhere in Paris, whilst our van had been stowed away in some garage lockup somewhere else in Paris. There was no reservation at the hotel. It was fully booked. In retrospect we don't blame the RAC for this, they did a great job for us the next day. It was a little stressful in the hotel lobby as Sean and I 'discussed' what our options were. I think the hotel staff noticed that were were about to kill each other. Rather than have us spill each others blood on their carpet, they came up with a room for us from somewhere. First thing I did was have a hot-bath, tomorrow was another day.

I reserved most of my comments until now, as I didn't want to interrupt the flow of Matthew's, uhm, story :-)) When we picked up 'Daisy/Damien', we were both hopeful that we could finally head south. With an estimate that we should probably get the cylinder fixed in Cannes, and a good guess that it would last 2,000-4,000km, we were off. Well, it wasn't much more than 25km later that quite suddenly 'D/D' started losing power, I quickly downshifted and got us off the road to an ELF gas station.

From there Matthew called the RAC, which is that first picture, and about an hour later the first of many kind Frenchpersons came to our rescue with a truck (the sequence of later photos shows this). He drove us to the car-is-broken depot, where 'D/D' was put to rest for the night. I was a little apprehensive about the place, as it was in a neighborhood that looked something like Mexico City, or what I imagine it to look like. The man assured us it was ok, and we decided that no one could steal a broken car, so our stuff was probably safe.

The Really Nice Guy then dropped us off at the hotel where the RAC had, supposedly, made a reservation for us. Well, there wasn't one, so we tried to call the RAC, but the attempt to save $5US by using the local phones resulted in more frustration, which is what Matthew believes sparked another show of hospitality by France, and we were blessed with a room.

A bath and a little TV watching later we were both fast asleep.

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