We took my car, which meant I did the driving due to having just the kind of insurance company that insist on having forms filled in. It took us just over the hour to the tunnel terminus at Folkestone, giving us time to check in on an earlier train even after being stuck in a queue behind someone not qualified to use the autocheckin interface.
The train itself is quite peculiar, first you drive your car onto the train, then along inside it until you get to your parking spot – there are staff waving people into the right places, you all just park in a big queue through the train. Once you’re stopped the carriages of the train are seperated with doors and shutters that miraculously emerge from the walls of the carriage. You all stay in your car, which gives quite a weird feeling as the train sets off and you feel your moving but the carriage around you isn’t and you’re not doing any steering.
After the usual trials of the Boulevaud Peripherique we hit the clearer roads to the south of Paris, I love driving on the continent, its just so big, theres so much driving to be done, so much exploring. After a day of travelling, and as the night was drawing in, we started to get onto the smaller roads, wigglier, of Massif Central. I could tell the landscape was getting interesting even though I couldn’t see it.
Eventually we arrived in St Alyre, where we were staying with Dave and David. They greeted us with huge bowls of delicious mushroom soup, there are lots of mushrooms in the forests of the area.
Highlights of the week included a visit to La Chaise Dieu, which is quite an imposing abbey looking out over a beautiful valley, Le Puy en Velay (which is twinned with Tonbridge, the town I grew up in – I’m still a little confused about why Le Puy, with all of its history and cobbles and everything, would want to twin with an unremarkable commuter town like Tonbridge), mushroom picking and random selection of French music magazines.
Lowlights included breaking down (although that wasn’t as bad as it could have been [insert joke about gravillons on the starboard bow here] and had quite an upside in the blackberry bush you can see on the right of that picture, hmmm, tasty) – top marks to the AA breakdown insurance people and the poor mechanic who came to collect us. Fou Anglais. And coming home.
Its an area I could get used to…. which is just as well really. The pace of life is somewhat different, and it somehow seems like a contamination for us to bring our city ways to places where such things are alien. It doesn’t work the other way around, country people can come to the city without fear of destroying its tranquility.