The Road Trip

After only one week in the UK, Spain was calling. I don't really think that the regional Burning Man event to which we were heading was calling as loudly as Brit Boy seemed to think it was, but traveling through France on the way to Spain, I was really looking forward to seeing a few sights.

Well, by seeing a few sights I mean I was going to be watching beautiful old buildings, plazas, and vistas from the passenger side window as we sped through towns and villages at close to 100 km/hr. See, Brit Boy felt the need to get through France in one day in order to arrive on the event site early. So, after disembarking from the overnight ferry from Portsmouth, UK to La Havre, France we sped off.

Now, I had voiced my distaste for this plan early on, and Brit Boy was trying to alleviate my concerns that my first visit to France would be a blur by promising a stop off somewhere in the Cognac or Bordeaux regions "if we were making good time."

Suddenly I was reminded of road trips with my father, only now I was my mom and Brit Boy was my dad. "But we're making such good time..." I was a little concerned.

We seemed to make excellent time, actually. We were speeding along, centuries old churches and town squares just blurs as I was gazing out the windows. It was looking like spending some time in the Cognac region of France was going to be a possibility. Until we hit Chatellerault, France.

I think I had dozed off for a moment for the "thunk, thunk, thunk" that was coming from the back of the van brought me around with a start. We pulled over into some massive hypermarket parking lot and tried to discern the problem. We drove the van in circles and crawled alongside to listen to this new sound. Onlookers must have thought us a little crazy and I can only imagine what they were saying about us. And considering the onlookers were French...

Unable to figure things out ourselves, we wound up taking the van to a garage. Problem? Well... the brakes kinda... well... um... were falling off and thumping against the inside of the wheel on the driver's side. Lovely, right? Luckily it was very fixable and only delayed us by a few hours. What this meant, however, was that a stop off for some sightseeing was not gonna be a possibility. When we finally stopped outside of Pau, France, I was exhausted, sore, and trying not to be in a bad mood.

Brit Boy was a little upset that I was so sullen and quiet, but I told him that we knew this wasn't gonna be my favorite part of the trip and that we should just focus on the beauty of driving through the Pyrenees the next day and stopping off somewhere for paella and sangria. Mmmmmm... paella...