Aysedasi's Le Mans

Le Mans 2011 - Ayse's Story - Page 18 - Monday

Home James!

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.