Is it worth writing about?
Not so far! A gentle drive of 450 kilometres with a friend of thirty-eight years standing to stay overnight with a couple of friends of thirty-six years standing on a beautiful late summers day with barely a cloud seen all day is all that happened.
I managed to leave the door open when we locked the car up for a piss stop (nothing disappeared) and we had a gentle walk for half an hour on The Ridgeway where we watched a red kite, a kestrel and various farmers driving assorted large pieces of mechanical equipment but this is hardly worth writing a blog about. Just one thing, if you don't know what The Ridgeway is, look it up and learn some English history.
An amble across northern France for a couple of hundred kiometres is also not worth mentioning to most of you as you know that driving pretty slowly down small smooth French roads through a series of, invariably pretty, villages with negligible traffic on a lovely late summers day is one of the pleasanter ways of polluting the planet.
For those of you that don't know northern France the differences from Southern England are quite stark - shutters, lots of unharvested maize (corn for the yanks), a horse and cart, charolais cattle, flat and woodland. It was the difference in that short hop across the channel that gave me the travel bug forty yearts agao. The one thing that seems to be evidently different from that first trip (at least in West Normandy) is the lack of those great long avenues of trees that you used to see forty years ago.
Arrived at the curcuit at Le Mans and, after dealing with the usual French bureaucarcy which most notably consisted of relieving us of the, not inconsiderable, amount of beer, cider, wine and Calvados that we had bought on the way through Normandy. This was because they were in glass bottles - not unreasonable really, we should have read the rules. Obviously four bottles "slipped our mind" when we were handing the goods over.
The camp site was practically deserted and it was evening so we demolished large amounts of cheese and wine, after visiting the bar obviously. We then watched a bit of the night practice, which is quite spectacular. They come round a sharp bend into the home straight doing about 90 kph then accelerate up to 250 or so whilst fighting to keep the front wheel on the ground - scary stuff. Yes, we had come to watch the twenty-four hour motor-bike race. We wandered round the back of the pits and got talking to a team that were in the sidecar race scheduled for Saturday morning. There were four teams within five points at the head of the world championship with this lot, Brits, in the lead. Le Mans is the last race of the year and the difference between first and second place is five points so essentially which of the first four teams won the race would be World Champions.
The Smith family all need large amounts of sleep so Joe went to the bed and I went to the bar, with a spare bottle, to read. I had just finished the bottle when a guy comes over to speak to me and I join the other nine people in the bar. Here we are oddities, we are not French. At the car race half the people are English but endurance bike racing is very French, three quarters of the riders are French, there is only one British team ; there forty-one French teams and thirteen from other European countries. 98% of the spectators are French. So this lot adopted me, a couple of them tried to speak English, they poured wine down me - great. I had to leave in the end because the guy who was talking to me got so pissed that he kept endlessly repeating his apology about his poor English.
So, I retired for a quiet night. You must be joking. About one biker in fifty thinks it is a good idea just to sit there revving shit out of their engines then cutting the throttle so that they (the bike, not the biker) backfire. This goes on constantly including all night. Joe had not drunk enough so he lay awake; I had not made such a stupid mistake
Watched some practice in the morning and then rode our bikes (we were sensible enough to bring Bromptons - folding bikes - with us) to a good spot Joe knows for lunch. I just headed off south-west, Joe kept looking at the map and asking people. (Joe is good at Foreign.) This all took a while and we wandered around a lot so we arricved at 1.50 - too late for lunch in France. Obviously this was Joe's fault but he blamed me! I can guess which side both readers would be on.
So we had to sit and drink Belgian beer for most of the afternoon. In the evening we did go into the nearby village for a damn good meal and, of course, Joe went to bed and I went to the bar. The camp site is not full but their are now lots of these idiots revving shit out of their engines. I asked one buffoon why and he said "ambience" These guys are all fuck-wits; only one bike in twenty is less than 1,000 ccs; they are monsters. For non-bikers 400ccs will give you a bike capable of easily doing 150kph fully laden and with a passenger - why do you need more? Testosterone.
I was last here for the car race in 1996 and the fair ground rides were horrendous then but nothing like this. The worst punishment was where you are put in a capsule, or spherical cage is a better description, on a sort of reverse bungee jump. You shoot about 70 metres in the air and fall back again with the capsule going anywhere and you revolving in several different planes at once. You then bounce up and down a few times until you throw up and then they let you out.
Two by the time I get to bed and, ignored the noise, which was truly revolting and Joe tells me went on at similar volume all night. I had had enough medicine to sleep through it of course.
Just about to go and watch the side car race, we have been here two days and managed to miss the first two races this morning. Joe has gone with an empty plastic bottle to try and recover the Calvados.
Well the side car race was exciting, the lead changed four times but it was our guys who won so that was a good start for the jingoists. Unfortunately by this time we did not have the right pass to go and congratulate the guys.
Could the one British bike in the main event repeat the feat? No. They were fifth from the start of the race and stayed there. At the end they were 16 laps or 65 kilometres behind the winners who had done 3,800 kilometres.
We started watching at the top of the circuit where they came under the Dunlop bridge doing 200 kph+ and plunged quite steeply downhill to take a brutal right turn (off the circuit used for the car race) at about 90 kph. They all made it round the first lap but not all the second. All in all we saw four bikes stop for various reasons in the first hour but the rate of attrition was surprisingly low, about forty bikes finished. The riders are all heroes, not just the winners - they don't have balls of steel; they are titanium. They are so fit - riding a motor bike at high speed is physically very demanding involving throwing your body around a lot at every corner to change the centre of gravity of the bike/rider combinataion. The riders show those overpaid prima donnas who drive around in protected coccons called Formula One for what they are - whimps.
We watched for three hours from various vantage points around the circuit and have huge admiration for all the riders. We could get around easily because we had taken the bikes, which was a great idea. That is unless you object to showing how the bikes fold, letting some pissed-up Frenchaman borrow it or object to being pushed up hill by other assorted gentlemen who had consumed the odd glass of vino.
We decided to go and watch in the bar but Joe got stopped on the way by the security men who returned all our booze to us - we are obviously two sensible elderly gentlemen. In fact the security guys all knew us because of the Bromptons - they are a novelty in France. We went to the bar and what was on TV - Sale versus Saracens - Rugby Union to the unitiated. A reasonable game but not really solving our problem - which was keeping track of the racing. For the bike race they use a circuit which is only 4.1 kms long so lapping had started within fifteen minutes, the bikes are all the same shape, you can rarely read the numbers because they are going so fast and the colour schemes are not distintcive enough to be able to recognise every bike. This is considerably different from the car race when these things aren't a problem - and there is a radio channel in English for a week too.
Found a leader board at the circuit at midnight and there are three bikes on the same lap. As a lap takes one minute forty seconds that makes for pretty close racing after nine hours.
Our camp site is inside the circuit and relatively quiet and peaceful. On the Sunday morning we went to the big campsite outside across the road where most of the noise came from and where they had burnt a car the previous night! It was the Wild West - the idea of no bottles wasn't in play. There was shit everywhere most notably great piles of beer bottles and cans; the concept of rubbish tips or recycling was clearly unknown. We also wondered if people would see two old farts on interesting bikes and think they could steal them from under us. We left.
At 11.30, after 20.5 hours racing there was a change of lead. A Yamaha had dropped back four laps to fourth from the three contenders on Saturday night but the Kawasaki, for the first time, lost the lead to the Suzuki. Refueling stops took fifteen seconds plus about the same time lost in the pit lane but they were out of synchronization and the Suzy stopped with fifty minutes to go until the end of the race having already lost the lead so the Kwacker won by a minute for the third year in a row. BMW were third, two laps down so with the Bitish Honda in fifth it meant five different makes of bike in the top five. The Suzuki team have the consolation of retaining the World Championship
To our surprise many people left before the end of the race and the campsite was nearly deserted overnight. There had been an offer to include camping in tents that you did not bring and you could keep the tent. A couple of guys who had used that offer had left at midday and not taken two of these tents. They were just opposite so I suggested to Joe, a good Yorkshireman, that he nicked one. He thought about it but for too long; when we came back at the end of the race somebody had had them.
The bar had run out of booze so we had to rely on our own stocks. The only Brits we had seen or heard were a couple of lads from Derbyshire who helped us with this task in excahange for some beans - we drive a hard bargain. There was wood in various places around the camp site to have a fire. One stack was twenty metres from us so we practiced, in Norman's absence, our pyromaniac tendencies and got a huge fire going. Pity we hadn't moved the stack or moved ourselves nearer to the stack!
On the way back to Caen we manged to waste half an hour looking for a petrol station that would take our cards. We failed, so no cheap diesel and we drove an extra thirty km doing a bit more polluting. When we got back to England, the northbound service stations were not selling diesel (obviously everybody fills up in France) so we made good progress but we had to stop in Guildford. You cannot get back on the A3 at the same junction so I ended up adding another fifteen miles to our travels. We were lucky. There was a coach crash that night in a tunnel on that road that killed four people and closed the road for twenty-four hours. Joe reckoned it happenned about 5 minutes after we went through so it was fortunate that we hadn't been able to fill up and get delayed!
I am going walking in Turkey in mid-October and thinking of visiting India and/or China at Christmas so may have something to say on either occassion if it is of any interest..
Not so far! A gentle drive of 450 kilometres with a friend of thirty-eight years standing to stay overnight with a couple of friends of thirty-six years standing on a beautiful late summers day with barely a cloud seen all day is all that happened.
I managed to leave the door open when we locked the car up for a piss stop (nothing disappeared) and we had a gentle walk for half an hour on The Ridgeway where we watched a red kite, a kestrel and various farmers driving assorted large pieces of mechanical equipment but this is hardly worth writing a blog about. Just one thing, if you don't know what The Ridgeway is, look it up and learn some English history.
An amble across northern France for a couple of hundred kiometres is also not worth mentioning to most of you as you know that driving pretty slowly down small smooth French roads through a series of, invariably pretty, villages with negligible traffic on a lovely late summers day is one of the pleasanter ways of polluting the planet.
For those of you that don't know northern France the differences from Southern England are quite stark - shutters, lots of unharvested maize (corn for the yanks), a horse and cart, charolais cattle, flat and woodland. It was the difference in that short hop across the channel that gave me the travel bug forty yearts agao. The one thing that seems to be evidently different from that first trip (at least in West Normandy) is the lack of those great long avenues of trees that you used to see forty years ago.
Arrived at the curcuit at Le Mans and, after dealing with the usual French bureaucarcy which most notably consisted of relieving us of the, not inconsiderable, amount of beer, cider, wine and Calvados that we had bought on the way through Normandy. This was because they were in glass bottles - not unreasonable really, we should have read the rules. Obviously four bottles "slipped our mind" when we were handing the goods over.
The camp site was practically deserted and it was evening so we demolished large amounts of cheese and wine, after visiting the bar obviously. We then watched a bit of the night practice, which is quite spectacular. They come round a sharp bend into the home straight doing about 90 kph then accelerate up to 250 or so whilst fighting to keep the front wheel on the ground - scary stuff. Yes, we had come to watch the twenty-four hour motor-bike race. We wandered round the back of the pits and got talking to a team that were in the sidecar race scheduled for Saturday morning. There were four teams within five points at the head of the world championship with this lot, Brits, in the lead. Le Mans is the last race of the year and the difference between first and second place is five points so essentially which of the first four teams won the race would be World Champions.
The Smith family all need large amounts of sleep so Joe went to the bed and I went to the bar, with a spare bottle, to read. I had just finished the bottle when a guy comes over to speak to me and I join the other nine people in the bar. Here we are oddities, we are not French. At the car race half the people are English but endurance bike racing is very French, three quarters of the riders are French, there is only one British team ; there forty-one French teams and thirteen from other European countries. 98% of the spectators are French. So this lot adopted me, a couple of them tried to speak English, they poured wine down me - great. I had to leave in the end because the guy who was talking to me got so pissed that he kept endlessly repeating his apology about his poor English.
So, I retired for a quiet night. You must be joking. About one biker in fifty thinks it is a good idea just to sit there revving shit out of their engines then cutting the throttle so that they (the bike, not the biker) backfire. This goes on constantly including all night. Joe had not drunk enough so he lay awake; I had not made such a stupid mistake
Watched some practice in the morning and then rode our bikes (we were sensible enough to bring Bromptons - folding bikes - with us) to a good spot Joe knows for lunch. I just headed off south-west, Joe kept looking at the map and asking people. (Joe is good at Foreign.) This all took a while and we wandered around a lot so we arricved at 1.50 - too late for lunch in France. Obviously this was Joe's fault but he blamed me! I can guess which side both readers would be on.
So we had to sit and drink Belgian beer for most of the afternoon. In the evening we did go into the nearby village for a damn good meal and, of course, Joe went to bed and I went to the bar. The camp site is not full but their are now lots of these idiots revving shit out of their engines. I asked one buffoon why and he said "ambience" These guys are all fuck-wits; only one bike in twenty is less than 1,000 ccs; they are monsters. For non-bikers 400ccs will give you a bike capable of easily doing 150kph fully laden and with a passenger - why do you need more? Testosterone.
I was last here for the car race in 1996 and the fair ground rides were horrendous then but nothing like this. The worst punishment was where you are put in a capsule, or spherical cage is a better description, on a sort of reverse bungee jump. You shoot about 70 metres in the air and fall back again with the capsule going anywhere and you revolving in several different planes at once. You then bounce up and down a few times until you throw up and then they let you out.
Two by the time I get to bed and, ignored the noise, which was truly revolting and Joe tells me went on at similar volume all night. I had had enough medicine to sleep through it of course.
Just about to go and watch the side car race, we have been here two days and managed to miss the first two races this morning. Joe has gone with an empty plastic bottle to try and recover the Calvados.
Well the side car race was exciting, the lead changed four times but it was our guys who won so that was a good start for the jingoists. Unfortunately by this time we did not have the right pass to go and congratulate the guys.
Could the one British bike in the main event repeat the feat? No. They were fifth from the start of the race and stayed there. At the end they were 16 laps or 65 kilometres behind the winners who had done 3,800 kilometres.
We started watching at the top of the circuit where they came under the Dunlop bridge doing 200 kph+ and plunged quite steeply downhill to take a brutal right turn (off the circuit used for the car race) at about 90 kph. They all made it round the first lap but not all the second. All in all we saw four bikes stop for various reasons in the first hour but the rate of attrition was surprisingly low, about forty bikes finished. The riders are all heroes, not just the winners - they don't have balls of steel; they are titanium. They are so fit - riding a motor bike at high speed is physically very demanding involving throwing your body around a lot at every corner to change the centre of gravity of the bike/rider combinataion. The riders show those overpaid prima donnas who drive around in protected coccons called Formula One for what they are - whimps.
We watched for three hours from various vantage points around the circuit and have huge admiration for all the riders. We could get around easily because we had taken the bikes, which was a great idea. That is unless you object to showing how the bikes fold, letting some pissed-up Frenchaman borrow it or object to being pushed up hill by other assorted gentlemen who had consumed the odd glass of vino.
We decided to go and watch in the bar but Joe got stopped on the way by the security men who returned all our booze to us - we are obviously two sensible elderly gentlemen. In fact the security guys all knew us because of the Bromptons - they are a novelty in France. We went to the bar and what was on TV - Sale versus Saracens - Rugby Union to the unitiated. A reasonable game but not really solving our problem - which was keeping track of the racing. For the bike race they use a circuit which is only 4.1 kms long so lapping had started within fifteen minutes, the bikes are all the same shape, you can rarely read the numbers because they are going so fast and the colour schemes are not distintcive enough to be able to recognise every bike. This is considerably different from the car race when these things aren't a problem - and there is a radio channel in English for a week too.
Found a leader board at the circuit at midnight and there are three bikes on the same lap. As a lap takes one minute forty seconds that makes for pretty close racing after nine hours.
Our camp site is inside the circuit and relatively quiet and peaceful. On the Sunday morning we went to the big campsite outside across the road where most of the noise came from and where they had burnt a car the previous night! It was the Wild West - the idea of no bottles wasn't in play. There was shit everywhere most notably great piles of beer bottles and cans; the concept of rubbish tips or recycling was clearly unknown. We also wondered if people would see two old farts on interesting bikes and think they could steal them from under us. We left.
At 11.30, after 20.5 hours racing there was a change of lead. A Yamaha had dropped back four laps to fourth from the three contenders on Saturday night but the Kawasaki, for the first time, lost the lead to the Suzuki. Refueling stops took fifteen seconds plus about the same time lost in the pit lane but they were out of synchronization and the Suzy stopped with fifty minutes to go until the end of the race having already lost the lead so the Kwacker won by a minute for the third year in a row. BMW were third, two laps down so with the Bitish Honda in fifth it meant five different makes of bike in the top five. The Suzuki team have the consolation of retaining the World Championship
To our surprise many people left before the end of the race and the campsite was nearly deserted overnight. There had been an offer to include camping in tents that you did not bring and you could keep the tent. A couple of guys who had used that offer had left at midday and not taken two of these tents. They were just opposite so I suggested to Joe, a good Yorkshireman, that he nicked one. He thought about it but for too long; when we came back at the end of the race somebody had had them.
The bar had run out of booze so we had to rely on our own stocks. The only Brits we had seen or heard were a couple of lads from Derbyshire who helped us with this task in excahange for some beans - we drive a hard bargain. There was wood in various places around the camp site to have a fire. One stack was twenty metres from us so we practiced, in Norman's absence, our pyromaniac tendencies and got a huge fire going. Pity we hadn't moved the stack or moved ourselves nearer to the stack!
On the way back to Caen we manged to waste half an hour looking for a petrol station that would take our cards. We failed, so no cheap diesel and we drove an extra thirty km doing a bit more polluting. When we got back to England, the northbound service stations were not selling diesel (obviously everybody fills up in France) so we made good progress but we had to stop in Guildford. You cannot get back on the A3 at the same junction so I ended up adding another fifteen miles to our travels. We were lucky. There was a coach crash that night in a tunnel on that road that killed four people and closed the road for twenty-four hours. Joe reckoned it happenned about 5 minutes after we went through so it was fortunate that we hadn't been able to fill up and get delayed!
I am going walking in Turkey in mid-October and thinking of visiting India and/or China at Christmas so may have something to say on either occassion if it is of any interest..
