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As readers of my previous few stories will know,
having chanced upon the drivers parade in 2005, we had made the trip into Le
Mans town on Friday evening for the last two years to see the parade. In 2009 we
followed the same game plan, but
little did we know that 2009 would turn out to be a lesson to us all!
We made a fairly quick exit from the circuit and
we were soon driving into the centre of Le Mans, looking for somewhere to park.
It was packed of course, but Ian and Martyn managed to get parked in the square
by the Hotel de Ville, near to the restaurants in which we had eaten on Friday
evening for the past three years. Jeremy parked his DB9 nearby and we took a
drink in one of the bars before heading off to the parade at about 4.30. Of
course this was long before any drivers would be sighted as the parade wasn't
actually due to start until 6 p.m., but Ian and I quickly separated from the
others and walked down to the area in front of the cathedral, before going our
separate ways. We had all agreed to meet back in the square at 6:45, as we
needed to leave for our evening meal at Le Belinois at 8 pm-ish, our
first return to our old Friday evening haunt since 2004.
I made a beeline to what I've termed the ‘collection area’ where
the drivers first arrive to meet up and find the old car they'll be travelling
in on the parade and I started snapping at whatever took my fancy. I suppose it
was getting on for 5.30 before the first drivers started walking across the road
from the car park to the collection area. The Flying Lizards crew were among the
first to arrive, with the Corvette drivers following soon after.
I lay in wait for the Audi drivers as I saw
them make this journey last year and I was able to get some reasonable shots
when they arrived.
But it was around this time that I
started to have a really frustrating problem with my camera. All of a sudden I
started getting "Error 99" codes when using my longer zoom lens. It
didn't happen with the smaller lenses. I changed CF cards several times and each
time when I thought I'd sorted it, it came back a few shots later. It was seriously
annoying and was really costing me some great shots as I had to keep stopping to
remove the card and try again. I even cleaned the contacts on both camera and
lens and although this seemed to help in that the frequency of the problem
reduced, every time it just came back again. I was now beginning to worry about
whether I was going to be able to use my long lens for the rest of the weekend,
particularly at the start of the race tomorrow.
I kept plugging away though, still very
frustrated at not being able to get into the collection area with the drivers. I
had hoped that the Creation team through Andy Woolgar was going to be able to
help in this regard but unfortunately Andy and Creation failed me totally come race weekend, despite my carrying the team’s logos on my website for several
weeks!
Time was moving on and I thought I'd better get
back to the square. I had to go around the parade and then over it to get back
to the cars. Even though I was there on time (I hate being late for any
deadline!), I was surprised to find no one else was there so I walked back to
watch for a few minutes more.
When I walked back again a few minutes later,
Nick, Jeff, Terry and Jim were there. The others soon followed and before long
the Tourists convoy was ready to move out for the journey to Moncé-en-Belin.
So, have you worked out what happened next? You
should have! We left the square at almost exactly 7 p.m. and over the next
two hours we tried every possible way to get out of the centre of Le Mans,
some legal, some less so. In the end, by about 9 p.m., we had exhausted every
possibility and gave up all further attempt to move out of the town, and found
ourselves sitting waiting for the parade to end (so much for the parade lasting
just between 6 and 7 p.m.!) and for the utility men collecting the barriers to
let us through. It was a laughably simple yet incredibly stupid mistake to make
and I kicked myself for not realising that we had parked right in the very
centre of the parade route and once it was under way we were locked in tighter
than the proverbial duck's rear end... We'd been here in roughly the same place
before of course, but we'd never had to leave the town during the parade before.
It was astonishing that the mistake we'd made didn't dawn on any of us! We had been due
at Le Belinois at about 8 p.m. so on two occasions Martyn phoned Madame
to apologise for being so late, but she took it entirely in her stride and when
we finally arrived at 9:50 p.m. she greeted us like long lost friends – which of
course we were!
And lucky for us, we had a really lovely meal
there - for me, foie gras followed by sandre, some kind of pike or perch-like
fish, which was very pleasant. This was followed by the house special chocolate
desert, which was way too filling! We eventually left Le Belinois are at
about 1 a.m., vowing not to leave it so long to go back there again and we made
our way to Le Grand Lucé and the Hotel Restaurant Le Cheval Blanc for our
usual Friday/Saturday overnight stop.
We wondered what we would be greeted with when we
got there as we were fairly sure that the hotel had changed hands since last
year and that Madame, a fixture since the first visit in 1993, had finally sold
up and moved on – after all, she had talked of doing so for several years. When
we arrived, bearing in mind it was getting on for 2 a.m., nothing much seemed to
have changed, although we were all rather surprised to find ourselves not only
sharing double rooms, but double beds as well, but we were all so dog tired it
wasn't much for most of us to get worked up about!
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