France'99 - Day 3 (Friday, Aug 20)

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Just after day break, Lucinda inexplicably takes the handbreak off to lie against my shoulders, but neglects to mention this to me. With the early morning fog still obscuring the view, I suddenly feel the car roll forwards, and wake up - REAL quick. Ahhh... what a start to the day. No harm done, and after a quick brush-teeth-and-try-to-wake-up routine, we start driving again.

Pretty soon we get to Luxembourg, and before we know it, we're out of it again too. France now, but first, we need a stretch of legs. What better place than the McDonalds in Mondelange, where we get out first real taste of the local cuisine, language and currency. Ok, two out of three ain't bad.

After our first McToiletStop™ of the trip, we continue on our southward path, direction Nancy, where we're greeted by the first of the dreaded toll-road booths. 159 French Francs later, we drive on. We make pretty good progress, although there's one traffic stand-still where finally we pass an overturned campervan with kids bikes on the back, and plenty of emergency crews in attendance. Sufficiently sobered, we shuffle past and continue our journey.

By the end of the day, we turn left after Lyon, towards Grenoble, where we get off the toll roads, and onto the smaller (and slower) mountain roads. A few close encounters later involving german cars (ie, cars manufactured in Germany, not necessarily cars with German plates) and a truck bearing down on us on our side of the road while trying to avoid a cyclist, we decide it might be a nice place to stop for a few minutes to perhaps turn religious so we can thank someone up there for our still being alive.

Thought for the day : "I wish I had a german car so I could drive like an asshole too". Somehow, the worst drivers appear to all drive BMW's, Mercedes, and Audi's. No, not the worst, just the least considerate ones. Maybe it's the tinted windows in them, and they just can't actually see other traffic. And then, maybe they're just a bunch of pricks that made me wish I'd not taken my Peugeot 206 standard issue but my Bond Mobile - you know, the one with the rocket launchers built in behind the headlights. Shaken not stirred, indeed.

We drive on, and as we turn a corner a little further on, are greeted with a particularly stunning view of a mountain side disappearing into the clouds, but with the occasional bit of the very top peeking through.

Not much later we drive through Briançon, and our destination instructions get more detailed. We make our way to the "Les Fressinierres" camping, and select a suitable site to put up our tent. We introduce ourselves to the Crux team, but of the other course members there is no sign - some are out on day trips, and the others haven't arrived yet.

We set up our tent, the largest and most comfortable one of the team (well, it IS a family sized one - the queen size blow-up mattrass only takes up about a third of the floor space in it) in an adequate 30 minutes and four seconds - but we'll improve on this time by the end of the two weeks.

Dinner consists of soup from a can, meat from a can, and crisps & dip for desert, and after a short time reading our library books almost dutifully, we fall asleep exhausted.