I went off on another one of my French jaunts today, over to the Poitou-Charente to buy a small trailer. It was a bit of a way to go because the trailer didn’t cost a lot of money and it took me most of the day to get there and back, but I don’t mind because I welcome the opportunity to see a bit more of France and don’t see trips like this as just being a cost of petrol. Not that I managed to see that much today because the ruddy weather got up to a few tricks.
It was chucking it down while I loaded up my tool kit, some other things that I needed to take with me and Toddie so I was already feeling pretty soggy by the time I got on the road. I was heading for a town called Médis over on France’s south-west coast some way to the north of Bordeaux, and I was looking forward to driving through a large chunk of France’s Bordelais wine growing region which I’d last visited when I was working in the wine trade back in around 1974/5. I drove past field after field of vines but what was really noticeable was how flooded the land was with many fields containing what were often almost small lakes of standing water. And it was hardly surprising because for the first part of the journey the rain just pelted down non-stop, and even as the sky cleared as I got closer to the coast, some small but violent storms kept sweeping through with rain so heavy that at times it was like driving through a car wash making the road ahead hardly visible.
My trusty sat-nav took me right to the trailer seller’s door and as I liked the look of the trailer, which I’d only seen as a small picture on the internet, we did a deal in a few minutes. But before we could get it hitched to my car it began to fall down again and we had to rush indoors to keep dry. It stopped again after a few minutes and we shook hands and said our good-byes. On the way home I saw what I think was the most intense double rainbow that I’ve ever seen that seemed to have its foot in the field alongside the road and I could have kicked myself for not having my camera with me but as darkness fell, the drive just became more and more tedious because of the constant muck and spray being thrown up by the traffic.
But the little trailer ran beautifully. I’ve been told that unlike England, there’s no trailer speed limit over here and I was quite happy to whizz along with it at 110 kmh (70 mph) even in those driving conditions. Not long after I’d got home, my phone rang and it was the trailer seller’s wife. She speaks a bit of English and we’d had a conversation together about the trailer last night. She was just phoning to check that I’d got home safely because she knew that the weather had been bad. I thought that was a lovely thing to do and is so typical of nearly all of the people I’ve come across down here. Would it have happened back in England? I really don’t know… 😐