Aysedasi's Le Mans

I was awake at 6:00 am after a really good solid nine hours of sleep, but decided to have another hour after which I went through the routine for the last time - coffee, shower and then dressed and I started getting my stuff packed. The Monday is a strange day after the excitement of the Le Mans week; Le Mans is over for another year and now it is all about saying goodbye to our hosts, To Le Mans, to France and getting back home.

We all met up outside at 9:00. I say all but it was of course only James, Lauren and I as Allon had long gone with Sean and Harry to catch their early ferry. We drove up to Auchan for some shopping (almond tuiles, lemon tea and foie gras) and bought some chocolates and flowers for Flo which on our return we presented to her and José together with the Centenary plaque that we bought earlier in the week. It's always a bit awkward this moment, even more so bearing in mind how little French we can manage between us.  Lauren and I have said many times that we must improve our French before next year. I am constantly embarrassed that I go to Le Mans every year but my command of the French language seems to get worse not better!  (Note – it is now over four months after Le Mans as I write this and we still haven’t done anything about it!). 

I said goodbye to room 117 and we said our final farewells to our hosts for another year and hit the road back to Caen. It was an absolutely beautiful day and we had a good journey, parking up in the car park at Ouistreham at 12:15, leaving us plenty of time for a good lunch of croque madames for James and I and an omelette for Lauren at Le Goeland, our regular return journey lunch venue since 2015. We joined the ferry check-in queue at 1:15 pm and moved to the second queue after half an hour or so. I was delighted to get onto the ferry really quickly after last year’s mammoth wait - almost an hour before sailing time, but even though the queue of cars waiting on the dock quickly disappeared we seemed to spend a long time waiting for stragglers and we didn't leave until 4:50, twenty minutes after our anticipated sailing time.

It is a fact of every Le Mans trip that the crossing was as unexciting as crossings almost always are. We did the rounds of the shops, well shop, as nothing else was open and I bought a few biscuits and some chocolate for home. I had invested in a cabin for the journey and Lauren made use of it for a while. Unusually for me I then had an hour or so resting in the cabin but it was small and rather uncomfortable and the air conditioning made it feel very cold, too cold even after all the heat that we’d experienced over the last week. We had a meal in the self-service restaurant, fish and chips I think for James and Lauren while I had some chicken stewy thing which was as memorable as it sounds...

We docked in Portsmouth a little bit late at 9:35 pm British time and after saying our goodbyes on the boat I went down to my car and managed to bash my head on the boot catch of my car necessitating a search for wet wipes to mop up the blood! I was off the ferry by 10:00 pm but then, as always, we crawled in six or seven queues to Border Control which took the best part of another hour. Once out of the ferry port it was an easy journey home with none of the roadwork problems experienced last year and I got home just before midnight.