What a day!

I left home this morning at just after 11.00 am to drive south-west into La Gironde, towing my little trailer. My destination was a small town called Lamothe Montravel and my reason for going there was to pick up some bedroom furniture that I had agreed to buy from Robert, a UK ex-pat who is selling up to return to the UK. Although it’s only just over 50 miles there from Plazac as the crow flies, the distance actually travelled was almost twice that and it took me about 2 hours to get there. Nevertheless, the journey was totally uneventful and the drive was an absolute pleasure as the day was warm and spring-like with a cloudless blue sky.

I’d checked out Robert’s house on Google Street View and as I drove up the road towards it, he was out checking his postbox. Realising that it was me coming up the road, he gave me a wave and showed me where to enter his sloping drive-way to make the short climb up to his house. Once there I stopped my car and we shook hands and said our ‘hellos’ – so so far, so good.

After a welcome cup of coffee, we loaded up the furniture. There was a wooden wardrobe, two chests of drawers and a small bed-side cabinet, and I decided to put the wardrobe on my car’s roof, the larger of the chests of drawers inside my car and the smaller one in my trailer. I started my car to turn it and face down the slope from Robert’s house, again without problem, and reversed back to hitch the trailer back up. Then it was time to go, so having bade our farewells, I started the car up again to leave. Uh oh, this time the charging light on my car stayed on, but I thought that it was maybe the electronics playing up a bit, which they occasionally do, so I decided to continue, stop a short way down the road and restart the engine, when hopefully everything would be back to normal.

But unfortunately that didn’t happen. The red warning light stayed on and when I checked under the bonnet, I could see that the fan belt had snapped. I thought that this would be just a minor inconvenience because I have break-down cover as part of my car insurance over here and I surmised that as in the UK with the RAC or the AA, a van would eventually come to my assistance and the mechanic would fit a new belt while I waited at the road-side. Er…. no, this is France, and they don’t do that. As we know from bitter experience, nobody keeps anything ‘in stock’ – shops and road-side assistance mechanics always live from hand-to-mouth. The recovery truck driver said that it would be impossible to get hold of a fan belt today, and as tomorrow is Saturday and everything would be closed by mid-day at the latest, they in fact wouldn’t be able to get hold of a replacement belt until Monday at the earliest!

I suppose that I shouldn’t really have been surprised, but this presented me with something of a problem because there was my car with a wooden wardrobe tied to its roof and open to the elements with a trailer on the back containing a wooden chest of drawers also with just light fabric covers over it. But I had no choice – the driver’s job was to place my car with its load onto his truck, hitch my little trailer onto the back of it and transport this load and me back to his garage about 15 kms further down the road in the direction of Bordeaux. So that’s what had to happen.

In the process I overlooked picking up the brand-new warning triangle that I’d put out on the bend approaching my immobilised car and trailer and when I remembered and phoned Robert up a bit later to ask him to recover it for me, he told me afterwards that it had already been pinched. So that was annoying. But that wasn’t all. On the way back to his garage, the recovery truck driver decided that he would call them up on his mobile phone. As he did so, he took his eyes off the road and began veering to the right towards the road-side ditch. I thought that he would eventually look up and notice, but he didn’t, and just as we were about to leave the road, I shouted! He looked up, swung the wheel back just in time and I breathed a sigh of relief. I have to say, that this is the only really scary moment that I’ve had driving in France, and I dread to think what the outcome would have been if we had left the road with the my loaded car and trailer on the back of his truck 😯

After we’d arrived at his garage and unloaded my car and trailer from his truck, I went into the office to discuss with the lady in there what was going to happen. It seemed that most likely both my car and trailer will have to stay outside in their compound over the week-end, but that shouldn’t be a problem as no rain is forecast for anywhere in south-west France until at least the end of next week. However, after my experience with my warning triangle, I have to say that I am rather concerned about the security of the furniture that I’ve just bought and I just hope that it won’t go the same way, because that will complicate things a bit, I’m quite sure.

The lady said that I didn’t have to do anything from then on until they let me know when my car was ready to be picked up. In the meantime, she would arrange for a taxi to take me home, paid for by my insurance, and when my car was ready, they’d arrange for another to bring me back at no cost to myself (all this for the sake of a £10 fan belt that could have been fitted in less than half-an-hour, if they’d had one).

While this had been going on, the recovery truck had been despatched to bring in another driver in a similar predicament to me, except, of course, he didn’t have a car and trailer loaded up with furniture. He was due to receive the same treatment ie leave his car there and be taken home by taxi – this way of working must be costing the insurance company an absolute fortune. Only one problem, as this was Friday afternoon, one taxi had already been despatched for me and they couldn’t get hold of another. Would you believe it! The other driver wanted to go to Bergerac, and although it would be taking me a bit out of my way, I said that I wouldn’t mind if he came with me and was dropped off on the way.

And so after dropping him off at the station in Bergerac in the middle of the rush-hour, we headed off for Plazac. We eventually turned into the entrance to my house some time after 7.00 pm, so the nightmare of a day that was originally planned to take around 5 hours eventually came to an end something like 9 hours after it had begun. And I still have a repeat to look forward to on Monday of next week, or more likely Tuesday I think. What a prospect to look forward to 😐