France Diary Day 5. Still in Langres

Not a good day for stress levels. The therapeutic effects of a holiday need to kick in soon or there may soon be demented, axe-wielding Englishman on the loose in the French countryside.

The car is repaired. The lovely Lauren arranged for another F1 taxi this morning. And the Directeur de rip-off at the Opel garage reunited us with our car in exchange for 200 euros. 200 euros!! They had fixed a fuse and billed us three hours. I am in the wrong job. I want a job where I can spend three hours fixing a fuse and then charge at sixty quid an hour.

Anyway, we got back, driving at my pedestrian speeds, at lunchtime it was too late to move on. So we paid for another night in Langres with the intention of moving on tomorrow.

As a side issue I started getting warnings from my car about unequal tyre pressures, so thinking a blow-out on the autoroute, tomorrow, with caravan in tow might somehow compound our disillusionment, I went to a garage to buy diesel and inflate the tyres. We came upon a fancy piece of kit that allows you to input the desired pressure and the machine does the rest. Unfortunately it was calibrated in bars and I only know the correct figure in pounds per square inch. Had I thought this through I should have realised that pounds per square inch would be somewhat rare in Europe, but I didn’t, so instead I ranted for a bit, and then looked at my mechanical pressure gauge, calibrated in both, and so once more I managed a rough translation.

By 3pm all our mechanical duties were done, so we spent a couple of hours sitting by the lake, reading and pretending we were having a relaxing holiday.

In the evening we sat on the terrace and I attempted to use the WIFI key I had bought earlier in the day. But the WIFI was down. They’re waiting for the engineer (I wonder what he charges an hour), so more euros go flushing down the pan, which is why this blog will not go online for at least another day.

And then, in the bar, the karaoke started, which is why I have just chugged down my drink in one, and legged it, and why this blog post isn’t even finished...