… saw me in IKEA where they had sold out of everything interesting and so instead I went to Marianne’s.
After lunch we took a pile of my old stuff down to the Charity Shops and then we went to Brico to buy a pile of cable to rewire all of her internet connections, and that took me most of the afternoon.
At 19:20 precisely I left Brussels, maybe for the last time as I now have no reason to be back there, and headed off home.
And I was glad to leave, I can tell you. Charity shops refusing goods, and refusing them with a sneer and an offensive remark, large vans deliberately turning into your path when they can see you coming, and the final straw was the brand-new Range Rover that tried to run me down on a zebra crossing. Yes, by that time I had really had enough and now I’m wondering how that Range Rover driver will be explaining the large size 9-sized dent in his rear wing.
Yes, I was in a bad mood when I left.
The journey home was exciting. The Lady Who Lives In The Satnav predicted that I would arrive home at 03:51, and I was home at … errr …. 03:50 precisely.
And that was quite a surprise, and for several reasons.
- She took me down a completely different route – the Mons by-pass, then the N2 via Soissons to the Francilienne, and then round via Melun, Fontainebleu and the RN7. She also wanted to send me via Nevers and Moulins but I took the short cut via Bourges.
- I made a few unscheduled stops along the way. One of the stops, not too far beyond Mons but in France was this absolutely gorgeous thing that I saw.
It’s been absolutely ages since I’ve featured any nice and interesting old cars in my postings, so it’s high time that we showed you another one. This is an original Panhard-Levassor and I think that it might be a CS model from the early 1930s – not that I know too much about it. But whatever it is, it is beautiful – it really is
- Another unscheduled stop was at Melun where at the ELF garage there – the cheapest in France, diesel was at 129.9. That called for a major fuel-up.
- and then we had the road works. The way out of Brussels was full of them, as was the Francilienne. I calculated that I lost about 15 minutes at least in that lot. And there were also road works on the roads between Gien and Bourges and that slowed me down quite a lot as well. In fact, along that stretch of road I started to fall asleep. It had been a long day
But apart from that, I didn’t stop at all – not even for food or coffee (luckily at Marianne’s I had made a big mug of coffee in my thermal mug). I was in a hurry to return home.