Sunday 1 June 2008

Vive La France... finale!

Righto, where were we?
Yes, France, obviously... our final night in the castle was great - the weather was super; lovely and balmy, perfect for dinner in the huge garden, under the equally huge tree... more French food mmmmm.
Photos of the castle... and the feast etc here:
The weather packed it in that night, with a ferocious storm howling its way through Jaulny; pelting the biggest hailstones (proper big too - they were somewhere between the size of a large pea and a broadbean, not pathetic ones like we get at home) into our somewhat fragile window. This was accompanied by quite a large amount of precipitation, most of which, it seems, ended up inside our car, as we left the windows ajar the night before so it wouldn't be so hot. Kent remembered this as it was teeming down, and thoughtfully risked life and limb to wind them up; I pretended to be asleep... my hero!
The abysmal weather continued for our last day, which was mostly spent driving... We decided that forking out another €20 just for the privilege of driving on an extra-fancy motorway was a bit over the top, so we made-do with the fancy motorway that TomTom took us on... not realising it went through two other contries before it reached our ferry terminal... infact, had we blinked and missed the letter 'L' in an oval on a road sign, we might not have even realised we had driven into Luxembourg... the same goes for Belgium an hour or so later... ah border control, schmorder control!
It was lucky we did take that slight detour though (it was only 20 min longer than the toll route) as we hadn't managed to track down Asterix in Flemish on our earlier sojourn into Belgium - they'd sold out in the bookshop in Ypres! Surprisingly, there's no setting on TomTom for "find us a town that's big enough to have a decent bookshop, but small enough to find parking on the main street", so after a bit of hasty map-reading, we ended up in Poperinge, in Flanders, where we managed to unearth the blasted book from under about 200 copies of TinTin...
With that task ticked off, it was back to the Corsa, which by this stage had started to make a funny grinding-y noise...hmmmm... Oh well, let's just keep driving and see what happens...
Made it to the Dunkerque Ferry terminal in time, no smoke, or tears from the car - phew!
And here endeth our French trip, or "ad-French-ure" as I like to call it... looking forward to going back - it was just wonderful.

In case you're wondering, the funny noise continued all the way from Dover till we got home... it's evidently the noise your engine makes when it has NO OIL in it!
Oops, Kent's bad.
It's all better now... although we did run out of petrol on the way home from the Sex and The City movie (clearly, this wasn't Kent's first choice for entertainment) a couple of days later... we're thinking walking could be a good option from here on in!

Take care,
Kent & Eryn x

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ran out of petrol AND oil!!! Drongos.
Lovely account, thanks. I especially liked the bits of Ypres and Le Quesnoy - why didn't we go to those places? I would be able to cope with a castle and lovely people. Speaking of which we found the French very friendly and approachable too. Their reputation must just be an English conspiracy, I think. They don't want everyone disappearing over the Channel.

Had Louis and Sarah here for the weekend, putting th eundercoat on. The kitchen people seem to have disappeared for the duration. It is getting slightly irritating being confined to one room of the house.

Love, Carolyn.