Three adults two grandkids and a chihuahua that thinks it's a doberman set off from London for France by car. What could possibly go wrong?
We packed everything including the kitchen sink into our daughters 7 seater Toyota prius and it was packed tight not an inch of space unfilled.
On the M20 South of London we got diverted and did a big loop and ended up back on the M20?
We had no clue what was going on and even the GPS asked if the road clear? It was.
We got to the leshuttle terminal on time to find we had a 4-5 hour delay. Apparently the M20 incident had caused a massive surge of vehicles arriving late which choked up the schedule.
We sat for 5 hours and eventually we were flagged to join the shuttle queue. Yay! except we spent another hour queuing again.
Finally we got on the shuttle and were on our way. Six hours behind schedule with a 5 hour drive in front of us and night was falling.
We were booked into a hotel just west of Paris close to the Palace of Versailles which we had planned to visit.
No one on duty
We arrived at the hotel at 2am and had to wake up the night porter who spoke no English and he's French was pretty bad too (he'd only started in the job that day) My French is generally adequate in most circumstances.
A lot of negotiating took place via Google translate which didn't work very well at all.
We had booked ground floor rooms as one of our party is visually impaired and has severe mobilty problems.
Needless to say the rooms we were allocated were on the second floor with no elevators.
More negotiating took place which resulted in us giving up on trying to communicate with the guy.
Why would a hotel hire someone with no language skills? Cheap labour?
The hotel was clean and tidy
We actually left to try to find another hotel but after driving around fruitlessly for an hour returned to the original hotel.
It was 4am at this point and we had to struggle up a circular staircase on the outside of the building in virtual pitch darkness.
At least it had air conditioning with the temperature at 36 degrees Celsius it was more than welcome.
We slept all day and abandoned the idea of visiting the Palace of Versailles (which turned out to be a good idea as it was closed due to the heatwave)
The next day we headed for our first holiday destination in Colmar France close to the German border. The trip was uneventful but still took six hours.
The Rhine between France and Germany
This time we arrived on time and unloaded the car in 37 degree c (106 f) heat.
It was boiling hot but the accommodation had excellent air conditioning which we cranked up to the max. Finally we had some relief from the oppressive heat.
Source: BBC News
Meanwhile in the South of France and also west of Paris separate wildfires had started up. We were nowhere near any of the conflagration and so we relaxed a bit. Over the next two weeks the wildfires got out of control and are still raging as I write this blog.
300,000 people (mostly tourists) have been evacuated in France so far and two firefighters have died in the infernos.
It appears from news reports that the fires were started by people. Many people have been arrested.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu warned the country "is going through an unprecedented fire season", with 116,085 hectares (286,852 acres) burned and 13,566 fire starts recorded since January.
The minister revealed in a post on X that nine out of 10 fires "are human-caused and most arise from carelessness: a cigarette butt, a barbecue, work carried out without precaution".
But he also said that not all these fires are accidents and some are deliberately set, adding that since 6 July, 162 arrests have taken place.
All things considered it could have been much worse for us on this trip.
We usually go to the south of France for our holiday but it was so hot 2 years that we changed our destination for this trip. Lucky we did I suppose.
Our history had determined our choice.
Like I said.
"What could possibly go wrong"
