First impressions really do count! While travelling through
France, I have found that the general impression of a town or city upon
arriving (clean/dirty, nice/rude, peaceful/hectic), tends to hold true for the
rest of your stay although small things/some people and places can improve on
that first impression.
After
leaving Carcassonne, I began my leg up the western coast of France towards
Caen, to the west of Paris and about 900 km from Carcassonne. I had to get to
Caen on the 20th as I was staying with Mathilde only until the
morning of the 24th when I would take the train to Basel to spend
Christmas with my Uncle Brian and Aunt Caroline. From Carcassonne, I caught a
train (with only 2 minutes to spare) to Toulouse, arriving at dusk and made my
way through a very busy, very dirty city to the hostel which was just around
the corner from one of the main churches.
Avoiding copious amounts of dog excrement, I walked through
the alleyways and checked into the hostel for the night. This was my first
hostel stay of the trip (after my week in Melbourne in March staying at ‘Back
of Chapel Hostel’ which was awesome), I had high expectations of hostels in
Europe however when I got to my dorm, only one bed out of 8 was occupied and it
was a sick Russian who just lay in bed and sniffed the whole night, gaining
himself the nickname ‘sniffler’ as he wasn’t interested in talking at all so I
didn’t learn his actual name. The one upside was that the hostel was
significantly cheaper than my accommodation up till this point and close to a
metro line, which I took the next morning to get to a metro station on the
outskirts of the town to catch a lift to Toulouse.
In the cold rain and gusty wind I stood outside the metro
stop on the outskirts of town waiting my Covoiturage lift to turn up, when he
did I was pretty happy. A really nice Mercedes 4 door salon car rolled up and
the driver Gerard and his wife introduced themselves, this time I didn’t have
to carry my bag on my lap which I was very happy about and I had heaps of
space. I was however sharing the car
with Angelique, a fashion student from Toulouse who was heading to Paris to have
Christmas with her family. The car ride was far from quiet and actually very
interesting as Gerard had worked in the Airbus factory in Toulouse where they
assemble the A380 Airbus and so we talked about that and also after being in
Carcassonne, and looking at the castle museum there I found out that Angelique
had made most of the historical costumes there while studying a unit of
historical fashion.
We stopped three or four times at service stations to
stretch our legs, to get coffee and so the others could smoke outside of the
car. Gerard was really nice and even bought me lunch before we got to Angers
which was pretty good.
One interesting thing I noticed while we drove in the rain
was that nobody really slowed down or adopted a more conservative over taking
style and yet during the entire journey (around 620 km) I didn’t see a single
crash or person sheltering under a bridge from the weather, unlike some Perth P
Platers in winter. One reason for this may have been the two small tracks I saw
just to the side of the highway near Bordeaux and half way between Bordeaux and
Angers, they appeared to be free to the public and quite popular as when we passed
I saw a lot of cars testing their brakes on the wet skidpan etc.
Gerard was kind enough to drop me off right in the city
centre of Angers which isn’t that big anyways but it certainly beat having to
find a bus to my accommodation, which I hadn’t even found yet as there weren’t
any hostels open so I went hunting for a cheap central hotel. I found a nice
looking hotel just uphill from the Christmas markets and narrow hilly streets
filled with people doing last minute window shopping, there was nobody behind
reception but a sign saying they’d be back at 5. I was luckily 1st
in line out of 4 or 5 people and logged into the hotels wifi (I saw their
password on the reception desk) and reserved the last single room available
online. This worked out perfectly for me and not so well for the other
travellers when the receptionist returned, by which time it was dark outside.
The room was pretty antique and the bed more of a springy hammock than a bed
but I would be gone early the next morning so after walking the centre-ville
and getting dinner I was straight to bed/hammock.
For anybody reading this who knows me even remotely well,
you would know that I am ‘slightly’ interested in motorsport, especially F1 but
also the World Endurance Championship (WEC). The most famous race in the
championship and also in the world in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, run by the
Automobile Club d’Ouest on an 8.4 mile long circuit, the Circuit de la Sarthe,
just outside of the city of Le Mans in the Loire region of France south west of
Paris.
For the past 3 – 4 years, I have camped out in my grandparent’s
living room for 24 hours in early June to watch the 24 Hour race live via Foxtel.
Even though the race wasn’t going to be run while I was there I decided to go
to Le Mans to see the town and also the Museum of the 24H du Mans. I took a
train from Angers in the morning to Le Mans, arriving around 10. Given my high
expectations of the town from the footage I’ve seen on TV and in movies about
the race, I was disappointed to see it looked quite run down and even more
disappointed with the towns people when I went to see the square where the
winning team’s drivers get bronze imprints of their hands in the pavement below
a monument to the race and found the handprints filled with dirt and dog waste
and the monument graffitied on one side. Obviously the town puts on a huge
cleaning effort just before the race; regardless the town’s people don’t seem
very enthusiastic about the one event that puts them on the map and attracts 3
times their population for 1 week a year. This quite royally annoyed me to say the least
as it is still my aspiration to go see the race live and it’s not so easy from
Perth so the townspeople are very lucky in my opinion.
After seeing the square, I headed off to the actual
permanent section of the 13.5 km long track that consists mainly of public road
during race week. This involved a 6.7 km hike both ways with my bags to get to
the museum and have a good look before catching a train to Caen to finally meet
Mathilde!
It was quite a cold but sunny day in Le Mans but by the time
I had finally made it to the main entrance to the track I was hot enough from
walking that I was only in my 1st layer t-shirt and got a funny look
from the museum guide when I entered. She was really nice though and let me
store my bags inside the staff room while I used the museum book to take a 3
hour self-guided tour exploring the different sections of the huge aerofoil
shaped museum which had a huge amount of memorabilia from the drivers and teams
in addition to the dozens of cars on display. I took so many photos I had to
ask the museum guide to let me plug my charger in and charge my camera half way
through my time in the museum. After the museum, I was about to leave the outer
track complex to walk back to the train station when I heard a car on the small,
permanent circuit so I jumped a fence (woops) and managed to get some photos of
an Audi R8 LMS from the first corner grandstand :D
The trek back to the train station felt a lot shorter as I
was going through my photos and the sun wasn’t so high in the sky anymore.
Getting into the train station I found that my train to Caen had been delayed,
so
