Solre-le-Chateau, Reims & Vitry-le-Francois

B(l)og

Hello again. 

As Rach wrote the last blog, I didn’t get to tell you about the time I was desperate and snuck into the staff area of a French Supermarket to use their toilet for a poo and someone came in to switch the lights off so I had to take care of business in the dark. Oh well, there’s always next time.

Aires

On our 4th day back in France we stayed at a camper stop in Solre-le Chateau. It was another free one; an Aire, as they call them here (or ‘an Aires’ as Rach insists on saying). God bless this French lot. They’re so campervan friendly. This one had fairly cheap electricity too - 2 euro for 4 hours’ worth. After parking up we had a wander into the nearby town centre and saw it’s big church with the crooked steeple. Extremely crooked, it was. More crooked even than Steve Ogrizovic’s/Cyril Sneer’s/Owen Wilson’s nose (delete as appropriate to your taste).

On the way back we had a look in the cemetery just outside the Aire. It had lots of impressive graves - extravagant even - but also some that were just corrugated sheets of iron with a few bricks plonked on top. They obviously belonged to the guy that built the crooked steeple and his family.

We spent a second day at the Aire because the weather was really bad. We didn’t mind though - we enjoy chilling around the van. I got us both to do the Big 5 Personality Test (https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test), which measures you for 5 traits - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. We came out very similar. Rach just had marginally higher Agreeability than me, which wasn’t really a surprise. She draws her lines differently in that department. She won’t shit in out of bounds toilets, for example, or argue with young spanish women, or slam the car doors of old Croatian mob bosses etc. Anyway, I recommend giving the test a go. It’s interesting to see if your results actually fit with the way you see yourself.

Reims

We moved on to Reims. I cannot speak highly enough of the place. Such a pleasant little city. It has an incredible Cathedral. I’ll never forget the moment it came into view. We both gasped as we came round the corner. We need to stop doing that. It’s disgusting.

We had a drink at a local bar, where they brought us A FREE BUCKET OF CHIPS with the round. Mesmeric. I was fucking beside myself. Rach said I’d tried really hard to hide how overjoyed I was as he put the chips on the table. She was right, I didn’t want to reveal myself as the lowlife that I am. ‘’Merci’’, I said as casually as I could, my nostrils flaring under the strain of concealing a grin.

 

I had been convinced there was a Bayern Munich player inside the bar, sat right on the other side of the glass from us. I kept looking, trying to work it out. I just couldn’t put a name to the face. Rach said he did seem like someone famous, as he had a nice watch on. Not sure if I replied to that or not. We’d only planned to have one drink, but we decided to have a second. ‘’Imagine if they brought some more chips out?’’ I dreamt aloud. ‘’Nah, that would be ridiculous.’’ After a while the second drinks came out, and so did a second bucket of chips. Oh my word. The Bayern player could go fuck himself with his mussels and champagne. THIS was the life.

On the second day in Reims I awoke to another of Rach’s dream recitals:

‘’I was at an all-you-can-eat buffet with Brad Pitt, but I was working in the offices from ‘The Thick Of It’’’ 

‘’Yeah...?’’

‘’...and then I had a cheesecake.’’

We had a brief stroll around Reims and another gander at the old Cathedral. The interior was nearly as impressive as the exterior, but I think the little animal statues jutting out of the facade just swung it for the exterior. After, we had a G&T at a bar, before catching a daytime showing of 1917, the Sam Mendes war film.

The last hour of our time in Reims was spent in a local Guiness bar. It was rammed full of young French students. Most of them didn’t even seem old enough to be in there, sat there with their blankies, crying and spitting out their dummies. It was a right racket. The place reeked of stale beer. The very specific smell you get in places whose wooden beams, floors and bars have been soaked in it over many years. The speakers were blasting 70’s, 80’s and 90’s rock. The attack on the senses was all-round nostalgic. I really could’ve been back in the Jug of Ale in Birmingham in 2003, waiting to hit Snobs nightclub or Ramshackle.

Traffic entertainment

On the way back to the van we passed a group of superheroes conducting a photoshoot. Bloody students. We then made our way south. On the way, whilst stuck in traffic, we saw what has to be the number 1 sight of the trip so far - a middle-aged man rollerblading on the pavement. He was clearly loving the attention of traffic. He kept looking up before pulling another little trick. He was doing spins, jumps, the lot. The great thing was he was good enough to attempt the fancy stuff, but shit enough to be funny doing it. He was loving it though, and so were we. He had earphones in. I bet you any money he was listening to the Bee Gees. Soon, the traffic got going again. As we pulled away, the guy looked up at me as he pulled one last shimmy, then disappeared. It was fucking brilliant. Well done that man. Sublime entertainment.

As we fell asleep that night, after watching my video of the rollerblading 40 year old for the 11th time, Rach asked me what ‘man’ was in French. ‘’Homme’’ I told her. ‘’Oh, is that why it’s ‘Pour Homme’ - it’s for men?’’

Vitry-le-Francois

The good thing about driving to a new place in the dark is that you can be really pleasantly surprised when you wake up the next afternoon and find yourself in a beautiful spot. And that’s what happened the next morning. We were next to a canal, surrounded by trees and chirping birds under blue skies.

Vitry-le-Francois is a charming little town in the Champagne region of France, south of Reims. We got up to some classic French activities while we were there - pastries from a great little local Patisserie, coffee in a little cafe and wine in a little French bar. The big three. I soon discovered that the French bar was actually an Irish bar. Goddamnit. Ruined.

Rach kicked her height outside the cathedral on the main square, which was impressive, then we ran out of ideas, so made our way back to the van.

The short journeys are always the worst

We could drive for 8 hours from one side of a country to another, but you can guarantee that the most stressful 15 minutes will always be the last 15 minutes. It’s the 15 minute rule. For us, the last 15 minutes are always terrible, even for journeys that are only 15 minutes. Disruptive things will just happen. Little things, like cars arriving at junctions at the exact same time as you, even though you’ve just driven for 10 minutes without seeing another car. That’s just for starters. Then you’ve got your bad drivers. Infuriating. Then things get a bit spicier, like you’ll hit a road closure. "Okay, whatever. We’ll just have to go the long way round." But then things really start taking the piss...

We’d left Vitry and were driving up the road to Lac Du Der, to a spot we’d found at the lake a couple of days before. We hit a diversion while looking for the petrol station Google Maps had navigated us to. After driving around for a good while, we realised that the road the petrol station was on was itself closed, so I searched for a different place on Google. The nearest was a Total garage about 5 minutes away. When we got there, it was just for big trucks. I did a third search, and off we went. The road layout was mental where we were, and at one roundabout we missed our turning and found ourselves heading up the motorway in the wrong direction. By this point, the warning light had flashed up on the fuel gauge. We are usually good for filling up way before we need to, but this time we’d left it a little on the late side. We needed to get off the motorway sharpish. Google advised that there was a right turn coming up, which seemed strange but we slowed anyway. As we got closer we saw that there was indeed a turning, and began slowing rapidly, indicating right. By the time we got to the turning, we saw it was a very narrow path which led miles out into the fields. Nevertheless, we decided to trust Google and took the turn.

By the time we’d passed the 3rd tractor I was ready to blow my top. Any second now we were gonna splutter to a halt and we’d be stuck, miles out in the middle of French cow land, or ‘vache land’ as it’s known locally. Eventually, somehow, we managed to navigate back to civilization. We finally made it to the 3rd petrol station recommended to us by Google. It did not exist. At that point, if there had been a James Bond-style ejector seat which sent me up into the clouds, I would have used it, and I would have probably exploded in pretty colours at the top.

As I was scrambling for the non-existent ejector lever, Rach disembarked in the normal way and got the attention of someone working in a nearby yard. Miraculously they had their own private tank of diesel and a pump, and filled us up with a quarter of a tank for 10 euro. Heroic.

We’d bought a bottle of fizz from Vitry, and we opened it as soon as we got to the lake. I’d never necked champagne before. What a mad half an hour. Just goes to show though - however bad a situation, you just have to hang in there, because whether it's someone with some spare fuel or a pitch-black staff toilet - someone or something will always come to the rescue.

Did I mention that I used to write the moralising bits for the end of 80's He-Man cartoons?

Recommended park up for Reims:

http://park4night.com/lieu/2224/