Circuit des Remparts - Angouleme 2008

Qualification for The Bugatti Race

















A Lovely old Peugeot

more from the Circuit de Remparts

More From the Bugatti race qualification

Two photos of Jackie Stewarts's Matra Cosworth from the Tyrrell Team 1969
(that is not Jackie Stewart driving)

Some of the cars in the static exhibition

Circuit des Remparts – Angouleme 2008

This year marked the 30th Anniversary of the staging of Circuit des Remparts in Angouleme, a classic/vintage/historic car rally and race our the city walls of Angouleme on a street circuit. I knew it was on around this time every year and last year being our first year here in the Charente we did not realise the significance of the event. This year unless Franca had not read another blog we would have totally missed the event, as it was we missed the Saturday, because we only found out on Saturday afternoon. So Sunday morning we got up early and took the 30 minute drive to Angouleme where we were lucky to find a parking place in the centre of Angouleme not far from the action. Luckily the French do not do early mornings, later in the day Angouleme was basically grid locked, if you pardon the pun...

Being a car nut I was like a little kid in a free sweetshop, I did not know which way to turn, luckily I had a disinterested wife (and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but cars are not her thing), and a 6 year old daughter to keep me under control. There were literally hundreds of historic, classic and vintage cars to look at on static display at various points around the city, Angouleme it appears has several car clubs, we came across the Mini club and the Alfa Romeo club but there are several others.

Then there were the races and demonstrations themselves. I have never been to a motor race before, my reasoning is you pay £100.00 for a ticket to blink and miss cars rushing by, then end up spending loads more money and you still have not seen much of the race and your wallet is a lot poorer for the experience, so I prefer to watch on TV. However for the princely sum of €10.00 you can get up close to the action and because the circuit is so small you can get around most it pretty quickly and most vantage points have more than one view of the track so you can see what is going on. The noise of some the engines is glorious especially the GT1 and GT Plus cars, my daughter loved it too, but sadly this put the wife off even more. The highlight of the event for most people is the vintage Bugatti only race, it is not only unique, but fun as well, the later models being really powerful machines and the early models with less powerful engines that glide around the course with a certain elegance being lapped again and again by their later bigger engined family members. We were also able to get up close (almost too close) to a Jackie Stewart Matra-Tyrell F1 car with a lovely sounding Ford Cosworth engine.

I could go on for ages, hopefully my lovely wife will post a couple of pictures here for me, it was a great break from building work for me, thanks to my wife and daughter for letting this big kid into the sweetshop for a few hours. I'll back next year for lots more...

so I will leave it there for now, next year we hope to have some of the people taking part in the circuit des remparts staying with us, Au Bellefleur would make a great base for this special weekend in Angloueme's calendar.

A Euro A Euro, my kingdom for a Euro

Or Floored by a Euro – or the lack of one

On Friday night I knew the title of this blog, but events over the weekend changed everything. So first on Friday night after I arrived at Bordeaux airport I hot footed it along to the big DIY store in Bordeaux to buy some flooring to get the new bathroom floor started this weekend, only to be foiled by a humble 1 Euro piece, or rather the lack of one. As with all big stores you have to put a coin on the trolley to release it. One of my main objectives of the week before flying is to have as little in the way of coins in my pocket as possible, this week I had done particularly well, by giving Fleur my Euro coins to use at the fair last week, and just having enough English money to buy myself a car magazine at the airport, and hey presto no coins to carry through the x-ray machine. No coins for the DIY shop trolleys either... hey ho, so no floors were laid this weekend, which turned out not to be such a disaster after all, read on, although the way that the blogs are laid out you will have already read what I’m about to call the next instalment already…..

The A-team

Knights with Mucky Armour.....

Franca always says that if things are going to go wrong they always go wrong on a Monday just after I have left the country. Well this started at the weekend but took a turn for the worse on Tuesday when our drains started to play up. In fact with a full B&B suddenly a number of our waste pipes for bathes and the washining machine decided now was the time to completely seize up.

Franca gave a friend of ours, Steve who lives nearby, a call and he came round to have a look and spent a few hours draining down water that had built up in the waste pipes and clearing a block he had discovered ,(luckily not the toilets though), and recommended that we gave all the drains a good jetting. He was star to come straight round and the crisis was averted.

Then low and behold, today Steve arrives on the doorstep unannounced with Bogdan our builder and a big jetting machine to jet out our waste pipes. Better friends you could not ask for, and if you take a look at Franca's blog you can see the guys getting well and truely stuck in.

Being 500 miles away I can't thank them enough, as that was going to be my weekends work, but they cleaned the pipes in a hour or so, Bogdan having managed to borrow the machine from one of his friends. Sitting 500 miles away there are times when you feel completely helpless in this sort of situation, so it is good to know that there is help at hand should we need it. As I said on Franca's blog, who needs the A Team when you've got real friends like Steve & Bogdan, thanks guy I am in your debt....

A busmans holiday

A shortish blog this time, as for me most of this weekend was a busmans holiday sat behind a computer trying to rescue data and kill viruses and spyware. After a day and a half I rescued all our data, but I had to give up on rebuilding the computer, so I am bringing the hard disk back to the UK for a complete wipe and re-install, not my idea of a fun weekend, c’est la vie.

It was also the weekend of the village festival celebrating the vendage, the start of the grape harvest, though I think it will be a few weeks before it really gets going as the vines are still suffering from lack of sun.

We had the demonstration of the pressing of the first grapes, which if harvested in the fields around Sigogne must have been from a very favoured position judging by the sweetness of the juice.

Fleur had plenty to do with a fair in town, she is slowly graduating away from fishing plastic ducks out of a pool to shooting balloons, but the prizes are still the same old junk that 6 year old children find irresistible.

We ate out on Saturday night, (not in the tent as mentioned in the previous blog) though eating out gives it a much grander title that it deserves, we ate in the local bar, which a couple of our guests had tried and found to be OK, however all that was on offer on Saturday night was, sausage & chips, pizza & chips or steak & chips, we though because they were going to be really busy, but it turns out our table of 8 plus two other couples we were about the only guests for the menu rapide.

Eating out was followed by the Sigogne fireworks display, which for a small village is really amazing. It starts with a lantern procession for the children from the centre of the village to the football field where the display takes place each year. Fleur was a bit afraid of the loud bangs from the fireworks at the beginning until she got used to them, then she really enjoyed it, although throughout the display she would not let go of me, so after nearlly half an hour of holding my arms we devoid of all feeling. After the fireworks there was a disco in a tent back in the centre of the village which we went to for about an hour then it was time for bed as the B&B was busy this weekend so we had to be up reasonably early to make breakfast, well Fanca made breakfast I carried on trying to fix the computer.

Well that did not turn out to be very short...

Going home...

14 days of exile have come to an end and I am heading back to France for the weekend, and this is not just any weekend, this is the weekend of the Sigogne vendage festival, a tad early but I guess they do it for the weather, however the forecast does not look that handy.

The B&B is also full this weekend so we will doubtless be running between the festival and the B&B. We are due to do the usual eat in tent on Saturday night with the rest of the village, and luckily we are only providing dinner on Sunday night for some of guests.

Over the last 14 days I have managed to move from Southend back to South East London to the street where we used to live before moving to France. I am looking after the house of some friends of ours who have also moved to France, though nowhere near us. It was handy being in the UK last weekend so that I could get my self sorted out and organised. Living in SE London means I am only on the train for 20 minutes each way so I get 2 hours of my life back, thought most of that time is spend washing, cooking and cleaning, though this is preferable to commuting for an hour and half in each direction. Though I do miss my family when I can’t get back to France for the weekend it is useful sometimes to be able to sort a few things out.

It seems very strange to be back in the same road where we used to live, especially as I am on my own, but very handy. I have already met a couple of our old neighbours, the gossip network had already heralded my arrival, so they were not surprised by my sudden appearance. Most things have not changed a bit in the 18 months I’ve been away, not that I had really expected it to, which was reassuring.

This is my one and only run on Ryanair, in the coming weeks, as I use it to switch from La Rochelle to Bordeaux. The BA flights have already come down to the level where I can afford it and the convenience of the Monday morning flight is wonderful.

Some of my fellow travellers have uncovered a very cheap way to use the Eurostar/TGV to travel back and forth for only €49 each way. The French railways have a certain amount of cheap seats which if you book at the right moment are certainly are good value, and since I like travelling by train I will also look into this as an alternative to flying.

Rentrée

Today is the 'rentrée', back to school for French school children after thier 9 week summer holiday! For Fleur and Franca its an exciting day, as Fleur starts infants school. She's the youngest in her pre-prep. class and together with 15 other children she will continue with learning to write and will do more reading as well.

Some pictures

2 Princessess (Fleur is at the right).
Another pony ride through the vineyards.
Our daughter with our 'neighbours'.

two posts in one day

Well technically its three with this one, I forgot to publish the post from the bank holiday weekend so you are not seeing things they have both been published on the same date, only through my forgetfulness.

My lovely wife may see fit to pop a couple of photos into the blog for me as there seems to be an awful lot of text and no pictures.

Enjoy the read and hopefully a couple of photos, you know what they say, a picture is worth a 1000 words...

A water weekend of the right kind..

Monday morning, well Monday lunch time to be accurate, and I am back at La Rochelle Airport after a relaxing weekend. I was supposed to be putting down the floor between the two new bathrooms we are creating at the moment, but due to the quirkiness of the French holiday system, all the shops in the local area had run out of waterproof chipboard, and since all the factories close until September it will be a couple of weeks before the stores are re-stocked, so there was nothing I could do except enjoy the weather.

We had a water day on Saturday, firstly going off to explore a man made lake just out side Angoulême, which had been recommended to us as an alternative to going to the beach, especially if you were not going to make a day of it. It turned out to be a really good place for small children, not only was there a small beach by the lake, the lake itself had a nice shallow area of water segregated by lane makers depending on how deep it was, so it was nice and safe for the little ones. Being a park with a large lake you got the advantages of the beach, along with the advantages of a park just behind the beach, so there were playgrounds, mini golf, and quite a few other things such as Karting, a restaurant, merry go rounds and plenty of other things to do, so the kids will not get bored very quickly.

We spent Saturday morning in the park, and it was not in the least bit crowded despite it being probably the best August day we have had weatherwise. On Saturday afternoon we had been invited to spend the afternoon with some people who had a swimming pool, which Fleur thought was wonderful, especially when she discovered all the play things in the pool as well. Cathy and Terry and Becky had only just moved into their house, but one of the advantages of having the swimming already there is you can enjoy it from day one. Terry poor chap was slaving away in the UK, so we only met Cathy and Becky (2,5) both of whom were lovely. We also met Steph and Finn, who was just about 2,5 if remember rightly, but not Finn’s dad, Charlie, they too had only just moved to the area, and Steph’s other half was busy doing what I should have been doing, working on the house. No doubt we will meet the other halves at some point before then end of the year, unless it is my turn to be slaving away somewhere.

Sunday was designated a working day, but it was a bit difficult to know what to do to help the project along without materials. In the end I did one of the jobs I was saving for a rainy day, which was to switch the garage around because everything was on the wrong side having put up the floor joists for the storage area above the garage. I had to switch them around because we will need some head height to get onto the mezzanine when I eventually get around to putting up some semi permanent stairs, or maybe we will just use ladders, not sure at the moment. I had my work bench where the stairs/ ladders should go hence the big switch around.

The good news is that just like Friday the Easyjet plane is nice and early, so hopefully we will be away on time, and I will be in the office in time for my first meeting.. no rest for the wicked as they say….

Bank Holiday Weekend

Back at La Rochelle Airport after the English Bank Holiday weekend, so its Tuesday morning and the airport is quite busy, with a Jet2 plane in already, so the challenge will be to get this one off the ground again before my Easyjet plane arrives, not something La Rochelle have a great reputation at doing, so we could end up with a traffic jam of 2 planes.

We had a nice long weekend together, I arrived on the lunchtime Easyjet flight from Gatwick so I was at home by 3:00pm. We were not very full this weekend which means we could do some things together, as I have said I was not going to do too much work. As we had guests coming on Saturday night I declared Saturday the work day of the weekend and got on with putting up the rest of joists we bought last month for the mezzanine floor in the garage. This does not follow my rule of completing one room at a time but I did not want to leave the joists outside for too long in the rain……

Fleur had her helping hat on and so she helped me mix the cement to fix the joists in place and level them up, which took rather longer than anticipated but by 3:00pm everything was in place, just as the guests arrived. So that will be ready for boarding ovcr later in the year. Next weekend it will be back to the granary bathroom to lay the floor so that I can begin insulating the roof and working out the layout of the bathroom so that we can start running the first fix of pipework. Since we have two bathrooms one above the other I must make sure we fix both bathrooms together, to ensure the pipe work ends up in the right place. But that’s me getting ahead of myself once again lets’ get the floor down and insulation in first.

After Saturday it was time for the weekend proper, and even though the weather was not fantastic we played mini golf on Sunday and went boating on the Charente on Monday, and in between played lots games, washed the cars, getting extremely wet in the process and even going out to dinner on Sunday evening, for an excellent curry with our friends and neighbours Steve & Lindsay. Steve made an excellent curry, and Lindsay made a really tasty summer fruit pudding, so we ate really really well. We also discovered a new game which will probably appear on Fleurs birthday or Christmas list soon. It was called Sequence and is allegedly quite addictive. Steve and Lindsay’s choice of music was interesting at times as we were treated to White Christmas and a couple of other unseasonal ditties, but all in all it was a great evening apart from the fact that being the 24^th of August we would expect to be eating outside, but it was so chilly we were forced to eat inside, another sign of the very strange and unseasonal weather we are having.

An international evening

Another first for me in commuting terms, I am sitting at La Rochelle airport and it its 8:45 on a Sunday morning and I’m once again waiting Mr O Leary’s air-bus back to Stansted. August is definitely a strange travel month, and I’m at La Rochelle now trying to keep the price of my weekends down a bit, so I am saving about €150.00 by taking this flight instead of the Sunday evening flight from La Rochelle to Stansted.

I arrived in Sigogne on Thursday evening so I still had 2 full days here, its just that one day was a full work day, for my weekday job as opposed to my weekend job. Friday evening ‘after work’, we had some visitors and what started out as a reasonably quiet weekend for the B&B turned into quite a busy one. Our visitors were a Belgian couple and their two dogs who had ‘discovered’ us via Franca’s blog, they don’t live that far from us, in French terms at least, so they came over for an aperitif. At the same time we had guests from Paris coming to stay with us for the weekend having booked at the last minute. They had asked if they could come early to drop off their things, but in the end they did not arrive until about 7:00pm, we thought maybe we had a no show on our hands, but luckily not. So whilst we sat chatting with Jan and Simonne the Parisiens arrived, so they joined us for an aperitif, then Franca got a phone call from another B&B, asking if we had a room for guests they could not accommodate, and so 20 minutes late a car with Italian plates arrived with a very nice Italian family, then 5 minutes later their friends came too (though not to stay). So suddenly Jan remarked just how international this gathering was. When we looked at it, we had Belgians, Dutch, French, English and Italians in the garden. This was amazing because, to us, this is what running the B&B is all about. It only lasted a moment as all the guests then dispersed for their evening meals and left just the Belgians Dutch & English to carry on chatting.

Jan and Simonne are a lovely couple, they have two dogs which are equally lovely, and well behaved, though because they were a bit big, and one was particularly bouncy it took Fleur a while to get used to them. She is still wary (scared is the wrong word) of young bouncy dogs as they do things unpredictably, but in the end she was walking the oldest one around the garden, and asking us again if she could have a dog. So it was a lovely evening, even though I have to admit to struggling to understand Jan and Simonne's Belgian accent at times, and I believe we have an invitation to a barbeque in September at their house, to look forward to. I have to say thanks also for the very original presents too, which we will be tucking into soon.

With guests in the house it is difficult to get work done, especially as I was in charge of our quick change around on Saturday morning, in charge is a big word, Franca said I should clean the room the Italians were using, because I can do it faster. We were due to receive a family who had asked to check in at 11:00 as they had a family lunch to go to. All went well and the Italians left on time giving me 45 minutes to get the room ready for the next guests, so no problems there. In the afternoon I had planned to put up the main support for the joists for the new floor in the garage, I thought this would take a couple of hours to do because I didn’t know until I started drilling, what the wall was made of. In the event the wall was solid and the support went up in half an hour, so I also managed to install 6 of the eight joists, so for once I am a bit ahead of schedule.

Saturday night was a nice lazy evening, no cooking to do as all our guests were eating out, and so we just have some standard food, with the luxury of sitting down together, just the three of us, and after dinner we just played some games with Fleur and listened to some music, and were generally lazy, it was nice to do , a change from the hustle and bustle we have been going through recently.

Well the plane has arrived so time to join the boarding scrum….

Hotel AuBellefleur in full swing.....

Well here is a first for me since moving to France, its Saturday night and I am sitting at Angouleme airport waiting for Mr O Leary’s bus back to London Stansted. I have been at home in the Charente for a week to help Franca with our first full week of guests. Full week to us means that all three of our completed rooms have been rented out.

I arrived in Angouleme on Thursday night and our guests, the family of my old boss from the time when I worked in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam, at de Zeeuw & de Keizer, arrived Friday lunchtime, a little earlier than expected, but we were ready. He had always said that when we went into business he would be one of our first guests and true to his word he and his family arrived in Sigogne for a week long stay. Little did we know what a test he would put us through, and I mean that in a good way so to speak. We thought they would eat in with us for maybe three evenings during their stay, but in the end they ate with us every night except one, where we already had an appointment which we thought was going to be drinks and dinner, and turned out to be just drinks and nibbles. Our guests also stayed at the house for two whole days just relaxing, so that meant providing lunch as well, so I am now sitting at the airport waiting for my plane back to the UK and looking forward to going back to work for a rest.

I must say it was good fun but hard work, because in a way we had hired ourselves and our house out for a week, which is a step beyond a B&B but also very rewarding financially. We also learned a great deal, and at the end of the week lots of my old kitchen knowledge finally started to creep out of the back of my head where it had been sleeping for the last 20 years. Unfortunately too late for this time but we will be much better prepared next time. We did too many visits to the shops and were not very well organised with our time, and probably not disciplined enough in ourselves either. What it would be like if we had the swimming pool as well I really don’t know, though we already have our first volunteer to come and work for us during the holidays, as the eldest daughter of our guests was quite enthusiastic about come to work for us next year, at the moment we do not have a room for her, but we’ll have to work on that, because with 5 rooms in full swing and possibly a pool we will need help.

The family consisted of mum & dad, and three children aged 14, 10 and 7, which meant Fleur had three playmates for the week, which was just as well as I had no time to play with fleur. The whole family were ideal guests, the children were very polite, as were mum and dad! The whole family werehappy and enjoyed playing together, and when mum and dad wanted a chance to rest they could, though dad’s idea of a rest was a 40 mile cycle ride.

We managed to come up with unique recipes and menus every evening, and thank goodness nothing went wrong until the very last day when I let the children help me with the pasta, it was the first time I had made pasta in France and we ended with something that we just could not use, too dry and no matter how carefully I added more olive oil it just dried out again, so with three pairs of hands trying to help and time running out I had to give up and use that old standby stuffed tomatoes.

We are putting all the menus down on paper (which is what we should be doing anyway) so that planning is not such hard work next time. The work was full on for the whole time from 8:00am until midnight, I was able to wimp out around 11:00, as I had to read Fleur her bedtime story. It certainly reminded me of my time at the Rubens Hotel in London all those years ago.

The weather was not bad, though very changeable during the week, at one point the thermometer went off the top of the scale, and this morning when we put our guests in their car at 6:00am it was very pretty cold, not the best weather for the Charente in August when it should be fairly consistently around 28 degrees and sunny most days, but there is always next year!!

After we waved au revoir to our guests we went back to bed until around 11:00, and just played games with Fleur, until we summoned the energy to clean the kitchen. Luckily we have not guest tonight so the rooms were left until the energy returns, maybe tomorrow, though of course I will be in London.

We get a short rest before the next short invasion next weekend, though these guys are only staying for one night, and they are going to a family party, so we probably won’t notice them until breakfast.

So this is my first departure from my local airport, I’ve arrived here twice before, and it is the usual fun of a small airport, however it is very nice little airport, everyone is helpful and friendly, and although the arrival and departure lounges are basically tents they have made it very friendly, not your usual departure lounge. We of course have the usual chaos of a regional airport, but this also has a charm that La Rochelle, Poitiers and Bordeaux lack. I only hope Mr O Leary will make this a daily flight next year, and maybe every an all year round flight, but the chances of that are pretty slim at the moment. With the flights the way they are it does not lend itself to bringing and dropping off clients, though the Saturday night flight is not as bad as I first thought, so if it runs next year perhaps we will try a promotion and see how it goes.