Tag Archives: gien

Wednesday 7th December 2011 – SO WHERE WAS I …

… last night when I should have been posting my blog entry on-line?

The answer was that I wasn’t here.

I was probably fast asleep on a Motorway Service Area somewhere on the edge of Paris.

Now that my stay here is going to be permanent (well, it always has been since 2007 but having sold my big apartment in Brussels in the summer, I now have no choice) I need to upgrade my electricity system.

The solar panels are of course permanent but things like the inverter, the batteries, the cabling and so on have been “job lots” picked up here and there and while they might be okay for a casual arrangement, things have changed.

I’ve ordered some additional panels and a new inverter, and … gulp … 8 200-zmp-hour sealed gel batteries, each one of which weighs about 60 kg, from my suppliers. And the delivery costs are astronomical, to say the least.

It works out to be far cheaper for me to travel there and collect them, so that was what I decided to do.

And I had a good drive there too. The Transport Cafe near Gien was open and so I even managed a shower, so I’m nice and clean, which makes quite a change for just recently.

But parts of the drive were exciting. At some small town round near Nemours somewhere, there are five or six traffic lights in sequence on the road through the place and they are always against you. And when I stopped at the first one the car behind me overtook me and drove slowly through the lights.

And did that all the way up to light number 5.

At number 6 you do have to stop as it’s a major road and I caught up with him there just as that turned to green – so I was past him again and back in front.

So now I’m settling down for a good sleep and I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow.

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Tuesday 26th July 2011 – NEXT MORNING …

… 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.

  1. 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.
  2. old cars panhard levassor franceI 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

  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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