… day!
I was reading a posting about a teacher friend of mine who had done an 8-hour day on a Saturday and how she was annoyed. My working day starting yesterday was 32 hours and 32 minutes, which is more than a teacher works in a week.
It was about 20:45 when I reached Liz and Terry’s this evening, and my day was far from over.
Caliburn, Strawberry Moose, the Brian James Trailer and the Takeuchi mini-digger crawled off the train at Calais as dawn was breaking, and without hanging about, we hit the road straight away.
copulatum expensium, as we Pompeiians say
“Keep away from Paris” was the obvious plan. I’m right on the limit of what I can tow with this outfit and I don’t want any police interaction or any confrontation with crazy urban motorists.
There’s a motorway from Calais via St Quentin and Reims as far as the far side of Troyes, and then over the Burgundy mountains to the motorway at Nevers, with only the centre of Auxerre to worry about.
And that’s the way that I took – a nice leisurely saunter where I sometimes even reached the trailer-towing 90kph speed limit.
The motorway exit at Troyes is … errr … complicated, with a series of roundabouts where the camber is all wrong for the unbalanced rig that I’m driving. We had a couple of interesting moments.
And I almost came a cropper at the Intermarché on the edge of town – I’d forgotten about the height barrier and the jib of the digger. But I could enter the car park via the petrol station. I had a very late lunch and fuelled up Caliburn – he’s been quite thirsty, and no surprise!
The mountains were certainly exciting, as anyone who has driven between Auxerre and Nevers will tell you, and I was relieved to hit the motorway again. With no policemen bothering me, I could drift on slowly through the early evening down to Sauret-Beserve.
And was I glad to be back? I’d worked hard over the 20 or so days that I’d been away and covered a lot of ground.
Now I’m ready for a rest.
