Gallery Rally — Jersey to Biarritz 2013

Day 6 - Montauban to Brive-la-Gaillarde

Evening all! Well, here we are on Day 6 - which due to the late update of Day 5 is a bit confusing. Confusing for us I mean. I can't imagine how confusing it must be for anyone reading it!

So today we woke up once again to Mike's alarm not working due to more technical difficulties.

He swears blind it's not operator error. He has even tried turning it off and on again. (You know you're in trouble when even THAT doesn't work!)

Just as well we had an Android on standby is all I can say.

Last nights accomodation was - how do you say - compact and bijou? But better than sleeping in the car.

At least we had a nice view of it to wake up to.

After a breakfast not that uncomparable to the 5 star one of the previous night, it was time to crack on with yesterdays update....

Better late than never. Well, hopefully, assuming you agree having now read it.

Update done by about 11.30am (check out wasn't till midday, so we made the most of their free wifeee, which we are pleased to say was a lot quicker this morning), we waved goodbye to our hotel...

and hit the road.

As we had enjoyed our night time tour of the red-light district of Toulouse so much the night before, we thought we'd head back and check it out again in daylight...

But something rather enormous caught our attention... (and no, I don't mean the Sun)

...so we just had to investigate further....

That was to be our destination of the day. We were greeted by our tourguide for the day..

 

He taught us all about Mars.

For example, he explained that the Mars Curiosity Rover is a lot bigger than its predessesrors.

And that Mars itself is a lot smaller than Earth...

He explained that the number of humans of earth is increasing so quick, it can't even be focused on...

And that bigger isn't always better...

Except when it comes to Sat Navs...

In fact, he taught us so much, we had to stop for food. Of course, when in Space, there is only one place to stop for food...

After a very pleasasnt lunch..

we went and collected our new friend from where we had left him....

(He was a bit like the Stig - didn't say much and never lifted his visor) and we carried on our tour....

 

Check out the Vulcain 1 engine.... so shiny and powerful...

I thought the above would make a good modification to the car, but Mike suggested we hang out for the Vulcain 2 as it is 20% more efficient. And when you're expelling combustion gas at 4228m/s, efficiency is everything.

Unfortunately, we didn't manage to find one, which was quite dissapointing if i'm honest. So to cheer me up, Mike took me for a ride in a real space ship....

...and we collected some real moon rock..

Then we stared at some crazy torquoise fluidy stuff....

....and some crazy purple stuff.....

And a biiigggg shiny ball...

And a really cool model of the European Space Station...

After that we went out into the boiling sun again and checked out where the MIR Space Station which crashed to earth (planned of course) in 2001....

But as it was so hot outside, we went to the IMAX 3D cinema and watched a film on Hubble which was amazing (I gotta get me one of them IMAX screens!)

It was so good, we then went next door into the Planetarium and watched a presentation on Water.

We'd love to show you pics, but they didn't allow photo's to be taken. That, and the Planetarium was so comfortable that we both fell asleep for part of it!

After we'd had our fill of Space related trivia and following the progress of man-kind, we decided it was high time we made some progress of our own, so we had a cool drink, headed back to the car (which at this point was actually hotter than the centre of the sun), and gave it a drink of its own...

(honest, I am actually filling it with petrol in that pic)

...and hit the road again..

It was still hot out there...

..so we took shelter from time to time....

We liked last nights Campanille so much, that we found another one for tonight in Brive-la-Gaillarde, which we reached about 7pm. In perfect time for a pleasant dinner (you'll never guess what we had to eat) and a more relaxing update in the comfort of our air conditioned room.

Only one small problem; the Wiffee - which was working when we got here - has gone tech.

But we will find a way!

All that remains is to add todays route and that will be that!

So until tomorrow, assuming we get this uploaded tonight, goodbye from both of us!