Day 11 – Poitiers to St Malo...
Well here we are again….another lie-in… We deserve it though, don’t you think?! And anyway, I’ve been ordered to get more rest by Dr Laurent, so far be it for me to argue!!
Alas, due to our late arising, Futuroscope wasn’t going to be on the agenda for today.. as it was we were lucky to get breakfast!
But we will return one day, and check it out, as per the Guestbook advice! (Thanks JML)
So its midday, we’ve had our breakfast of stale French bread and cold coffee.. (mmmm yumm…)… well, I guess this was a Hotel Ibis after all, AND it was midday…they were trying to clear up the breakfast stuff as it was…
Anyway, we hit the road, and after stopping to clear the screen of zillions of dead flys (I kid you not, there were so many, I really was having trouble focusing on the road and not the flies!) and were soon passing many lovely sights… such as this…
And also like this one…
We even passed through a town where we discovered what Franco really gets up to at the weekend..
The entertainment provided in France to while away the time spent in traffic jams is a vast improvement on Spain too!
We soon found ourselves on the open road, leaving behind the traffic..
…happily paying our tolls…
…and finding ourselves very lonely on the fantastic French Autoroutes!!
We eventually got so lonely, we went in search of some company and stopped for a fantastic crepe at this place…
If anyone wishes to find out exactly how good it was, this is where they are…
After lunch and a quick drink or 2…
…we continued on our merry journey in the general direction of St Malo, being careful to watch our speeds due to the sad and scary warnings… (these signs are not pleasant, but they do bring home the seriousness of it all. If only the French drivers followed their own advice)
We also found our first ever French speed camera!
A little later down the road, we realised we had a serious situation on our hands; we’d run out of music. Yes, 19 CDs, 7 of which had 7 albums on them, and we’d run out of music. (I think we’d listened to them all twice already by this point!)
But serious times call for serious measures! We had to either stop, or go home. Now.
Fortunately, we’d actually made such good time in our last 4 hours driving, that we rolled up in St Malo at 5.10pm!
We decided we’d call into the Port and see if there was any chance they could move us on to an earlier sailing the next day, seeing as we had arrived 24 hours ahead of schedule! (Mike, isn’t this about the first time we’ve arrived anywhere early on the whole trip?)
As luck would have it, there was a 5.30pm crossing that had been delayed by 15 minutes, so by 5.20pm, we were checked in and boarding the Wednesday afternoon boat, and by 5.45pm the boat was exiting the harbour, and we were waving good bye to France!
1 hour and ten minutes later, we were escorted into Jersey waters…
And were soon reversing towards our berth…
And then we were back in the island of slow speed limits…
A great trip back, and all that remained was to drive home (which took about as long as the boat trip from France to Jersey!), unpack, and transfer the 4gb’s worth of photographs that we’d snapped!!
Tomorrow, I’ll attempt to remove some of the debris from the last few days driving!
Now, it has become customary at this point in the proceedings to provide you some of the more technical (boring??!!) information about the trip; what we record about our trips every year is either very impressive, or extremely sad! One day however, we’ll be able to build up historic graphs of telemetry information that would make even Will Courtenay proud, although our collection techniques are not quite up to Jaguar Racing’s standards (I’m fairly sure they don’t use Excel, and personally, I’ve never seen Mark Webber pull into the pits with a laptop on his lap, check the fuel prices and enter them into the spreadsheet, but I am happy to be corrected!)
Anyway, for those interested, read on; for those not…. I’m not entirely sure what to suggest, so you may as well read on as anyway!
Total mileage covered on the 11 days: 2102
Total litres of fuelled burned was: 444 litres of Super 98*
Best fuel consumption: 26 mpg
Worst fuel consumption: 19 mpg
Over-all average: 23 mpg
I did tell you we recorded everything! Well, we have to do something to while away the miles! If nothing else, we can tell you where the cheapest garages are to fill up at!
There’s more info if you’re interested! You’re not? Sure? Hmm, surprising really!
Ok, well I’ll move on! In fact the time is heading towards 4.30am, so its about time I got uploading to ensure you all have your email waiting for you bright and early.
Fortunately, being at home again now, its 512k ADSL for me tonight! Yay!
Just before drawing to a close another fabulous Bush Hospital Foundation Tour…
…we’d both like to (well, I haven’t checked with Mike, and I’m fairly confident he wouldn’t appreciate me calling him now to ask, but I know he’d agree!) thank everyone involved in the trip for making it the usual fantastic time for us. Chip and Heidi – for another excellent year of clever clues and fantastic locations; Dr Marks and Henrietta – for the excellent work you continue to do with the fund raising and organisation. Not to mention the Marshalling of us all every year! Jennifer and Peter – thanks for everything! Sorry we didn’t get to see you after the race. Seth - we all missed you. Brian and Spence - Thanks for dinner and your company; hope you enjoyed the race and got back to Jersey safely and in time for school/work! I want to see a pic of that Hammock! And to all the competitors and friends we’ve made doing the trips over the last 7 years – we look forward seeing you again next year!!
Thanks to all the people back home who sponsored us and / or bought Raffle Tickets from us; sorry you didn’t win the car – but fear not, there is always next year!! And this time you’ll win. I promise! Again!
Thanks to Geoff Vibert, Eddie Edmondson and all at CTS Computing for their (continued) generous sponsorship again this year, and a special mention to Mark Watson for doing such an excellent job in setting up the Website so someone even as Web illiterate as myself could update it!!
A couple of locations have already been mentioned for the Tour de Liberation 2005, and you can rest assured we have already checked out Autoroute and planned our ‘post trip’ trip to include some new countries!!!
Finally, thanks to everyone who has supported us by following our progress on this website, and for all who posted comments in the Guest book. I’m sure Mark will keep it online for a little while longer, so anyone who wishes to post comments can still continue to do so! I think we should have a competition for the wittiest one posted! They’ve been excellent.
And on that note, that’s all folks, you’ll be relieved to hear! Until the next one, good bye and thanks from both of us!
Garry and Mike.
* Will, on the subject of 98 octane, I’d be very grateful if you could tell me what octane fuel F1 cars are run on. I did ask ITV-F1 once, but they ignored me!! Thanks!!