To La Rochelle

We were lapped by several Screwballers en route to La Rochelle.  Although we'd planned to do as many back roads as possible, it became obvious that in order to get to the campsites before dark, a lot of the time we had to take toll roads.

Seeing that our route took us through Bordeaux I was excited at the prospect of getting some  photographs of rolling countryside, vineyards and those enormous bottles they have on the side of the road advertising the name of the vineyard.  I hadn't realised just how stressed Mandy was about going straight to the campsite and had a small (tiny in fact) hissy fit when she drove straight past a fabulous fifteen foot high bottle on the edge of a beautiful vineyard.  

'Emily' on sat nav was back in favour once more as we drove into La Rochelle and found the site without taking a single wrong turn.  Mandy breathed the biggest sigh of relief as we set up camp around the twenty or so teams who'd arrived earlier.  Other teams came in in spits and spurts - some quite literally - even after dark.

Despite the relief of reaching La Rochelle, Mandy was anxious to find out what was causing the engine 'flutter' and, on a minor note, to try and cable tie the wing mirror so that I wasn't permanently left with a forefinger on my left hand that wouldn't bend.  In the meantime, I set up camp.

On the previous night we had shared beers with a team of three from Scotland and Belgium whose theme was Tintin.  Tintin (aka Simon the self confessed petrol head) was travelling with his faithful dog Snowy and Thomson and Thompson, the two incompetent detectives.  Fortunately for us, Tintin knew immediately what was wrong with the Ark.  He identified a worn screw in the points as the culprit and schnaffled whatever bit was needed from another part of the car to fix it.  Mandy was ecstatic.  We might make it to the finish line!  Even I, a complete non-petrol head appreciated how differently the Ark drove the following day.

With Mandy and I relaxed, we set off with James (the organiser of the rally), a couple of other marshalls and one or two of the other teams for a "fifteen minute stroll" (according to James' campsite info sheet) into town to find somewhere to eat.  Three quarters of an hour later we arrived at the harbour of La Rochelle, a beautiful place surrounded by bars, shops and restaurants. 

Already thrilled that the Ark was back up and running with the help of Tintin, we now discovered that Gillian (aka one of the Thom/p/son twins) spoke fluent French.  It was wonderful to sit down and let her do all the ordering for non-alcoholic beer (that's Mandy, not me!) and vegetarian noodles (again, Mandy, not me) and wine and steak.  Yes, you guessed it, me.

After a nice meal, we (well, Gillian ...) ordered a taxi to take us back to the site where we fell into our tent and slept soundly til we were woken by the Tintin crew at 8am suggesting we go for coffee at the harbour.