Tag Archives: formule one

Friday 6th July – I’M DEFINITELY FEELING …

… poorly right now.

We’re back on the “sleeping all day and eating nothing” spell that we know so well. It was a good plan to book myself in here at the Première Class Hotel in Liège for several days.

A word about the hotel though. They are in general good hotels – well sited, cheap and convenient. But I’ve noticed once or twice now that the rooms are starting to have little defects and the maintenance isn’t being kept up.

I can see them going the way of the Formule 1 hotels if they don’t start to get on top of the little irritating defects.

But be that as it may, I slept until just before 02:00, went off again round about 03:00 and had a brief spell of awakening before going back to sleep until the alarm went off.

And I’d been on my travels too – watching a film starring Michael Caine about a whole series of vicious murders. It turned out that a male transvestite had had a very hard time in a prison and so was intent on dealing with all of the people who had sent him there. He was only exposed by accident at the very last moment when Michael Caine, deciding not to go home but to go to the delicatessan instead (this action took place in Stoke on Trent by the way), recognised the person travelling on a bus that turned at a junction right by where he was standing.
Later on during the night I was with a young girl, about 15 or so, and we’d been on a bus trip to Scotland. At the time to leave, two people hadn’t turned up so we had to wait for them. It turns out that they were Scots women and, as they freely admitted, they had had a drop too much to drink. And this made the journey back very uncomfortable.

I hadn’t paid for breakfast here, because I’ve had issues with that in these places, so my intention was to pay as I go along. But somehow I just couldn’t fancy eating anything.

Instead, I mooched around, did some work, crashed out again, that kind of thing.

Eventually I went for a walk to look for a branch of the Fortis Bank (to no avail) and did some shopping in the Cora supermarket down the road. I’ve bought myself another electric fan. It’s stifling in here and I can’t do with the heat.

And even though I’m not eating, grapes at €2:45 a kilo were too good to resist as was a litre of banana-flavoured soya milk.

Having had another lie-down, I made some sandwiches and to my surprise managed to eat them too. And then another lie-down until about 18:00.

Yes, I’m not feeling so good right now but one thing that we do know is that it will all be better in a day or two. It goes in cycles like that.

Now, it’s just a case of riding out the storm. Or sleeping it out.

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Sunday 20th March 2016 – JUST IN CASE ANYONE IS WONDERING …

… the big patch of oil right by where I park Caliburn is due to the fact that I didn’t notice that there was a hole in the filler neck of my oil container when I was topping him up this morning. I seem to have ended up with more oil on the floor than in Caliburn’s engine. But he’s been topped up with water too, windscreen wiper liquid, all kinds of things.

I also washed and scrubbed all of the camping gear too so that that’s all ready. And apart from the coffee, I also seem to have forgotten the matches too. But at least I can buy them en route somewhere, I suppose.

So after a memorable night, memorable in the sense that I don’t remember anything about it, except for somewhere there was a girl of about 4 or 5 and another one, dressed in red and white, aged about 12 in it somewhere, that’s my lot. I was up yet again before the alarm clock and after breakfast, prepared myself, Caliburn and Strawberry Moose for the departure. All of my paperwork is on board as well, and I’ll let the new doctor sort out what he wants from all of this.

And after lunch, which was more home-made mushroom soup (made of real home-made mushrooms of course), we set off into the mist, rather like the boy who took his girlfriend out into the fog and mist.

chateau de puy guillon vernusse allier france. Letting The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav do her work, we followed a merry, mazy ramble through the Auvergne countryside towards the expressway at Montmarault, passing by the Chateau de Puy Guillon at Vernusse, somewhere that I have certainly never seen before.

Impressive it certainly is and well-worth a photo even if the battery in the Nikon D5000 was flat so that I had to use the camera on the phone.

And you can see what I mean about the mist as well.

Once I joined the expressway, the rest of the route was without a problem and everything went according to plan, although having left the SatNav on “shortest distance” rather than changing it to “quickest route” did show me parts of Fontainebleu that I have certainly never seen before. I fuelled up as usual at the cheap fuel station at Melun and then took the Francilienne as far as the N2 where I headed off in the direction of Soissons.

This was where the fun started because, having determined not to stop until I’d passed the rear of Charles de Gaulle airport, I then couldn’t find a hotel, astonishing as it might seem. That’s not quite correct – I drove three times around Villers-Cotterets following signs to hotels that clearly only existed in the minds of the signwriters, and found a place that was nominally a three-star hotel but looked like a chateau and would have been outside my price range.

Soissons wasn’t much better either. I found all of the post hotels, like the Campanile and so on, but nothing in my price range at all but a few miles outside the town, in a place called Crouy, I found a modern type of hotel, the New Access Hotel, advertising rooms at €35:00 plus breakfast €5:00. Full of foreboding, but tired and fed up and in the dark, I went and signed in.

As I feared, it was an old Formule One, clearly sold off by Accor as it needed renovation and wasn’t worth the money spending on it, and now run by an Indian family, as most of these places all over the western world seem to be. We discussed meals and it seemed that there was a pizza delivery service nearby, so I placed my order (there was a microwave so adding my own cheese would be no problem) and went to my room.

Despite half an hour trying, I couldn’t get the heating to work and it was cold. And then the plug was so tight up against the wall that I couldn’t plug in the laptop or the battery charger for the Nikon D5000. And then I realised that I’d been there an hour and my pizza hadn’t come.

So off I trotted downstairs and saw the daughter of the hotel owners. I told her about the pizza, so she asked me if I wanted to call them to remind them. I had a better idea. “You call them and cancel it. I’ll go and find something else” – having passed a kebab and pizza place just down the road.

I passed the pizza delivery driver on the access road but it was too late by then – my tail was up. And I had the last laugh too because it turned out that where I went to was the same place as where the pizza had been ordered from, and there was a free salad included to all take-away customers, and the salad would have made a meal on its own.

So back at Ice-Station Zebra and I refused a shower in the communal facilities. I ate my pizza and salad and with no electricity to charge up the laptop (I should have done that in Caliburn on the way up) I crawled fully-clothed under the covers, kicked out the bed-bugs and settled down for the night.

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