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So the race was over for
another year, and it was a case of making the most of our final day of Le Mans
2011. Neither James or I were keen to rise early, having had plenty of lost
sleep to make up for from Saturday night. I did get up around 9 am and did
a bit of initial packing and eventually met James downstairs. We headed up
to our bar but the café was closed, a first sign that we were unlikely to find
much open on what we gathered was a bank holiday in France - and it seemed that
French shop-keepers were more keen to observe holidays than their British
counterparts!
We had already decided to
leave a gift of some kind for Madame at the hotel. We wanted to make sure
that we left a good impression as this would not only be a nice 'thankyou' but might ease the booking process for 2012!
But that was now looking rather difficult if we would struggle to find anywhere
open. But we went around the corner from the bar, just on the off-chance
that the little bakery/patisserie might be open and were amazed to find it doing
a roaring trade. I guess the French just have to have their fantastic fresh
bread, public holiday or not. So we bought some croissants and pain au
chocolates for our breakfast and a box of home made chocolates for Madame.
When we returned to the
hotel, Madame seemed very touched by our gift and Monsieur was left in no doubt
that we were expecting to return in 2012!
It didn't take long to
finish our packing and load up the car and we were soon on our way back to the
coast. I'd suggested that we might lunch at Port en Bessin which was an
old haunt of the Tourists. The weather was buy now very changeable and we
went from drizzling rain to bright sunshine by the time we reached Port en
Bessin. Unfortunately we arrived just too late to take lunch in the Hotel
La Marine, but instead we filled ourselves with mussels and far too much pizza
at a small restaurant just down the road.
Time was pressing on and we
headed back to Cherbourg where we stopped at the hypermarket, a near-disastrous
move which saw us queuing for about an hour for the supposedly 'quick service'
checkouts. It seemed that this was the only store open for miles around
and half the country's population seemed to be queuing in it with us.....
We eventually made it back
to the ferry for another of those uneventful channel crossings, made a little
sweeter by the fact that we were again on the fast boat, as indeed were the
Tourists, who we met in the ferry queue!
On arrival in Portsmouth, we
were off the boat relatively quickly and James and I said our goodbyes for
another year, with the aim of meeting up at Silverstone in September for the
ILMC/LMS race. After about 45 minutes wait I was picked up again by my
brother-in-law Mervyn and my wife Jayne for the journey back home.
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