At the beginning of the year Matt suggested it would be pretty cool to drive to a wine warehouse in France in the Biturbos to have some lunch and pick up some nice cheap wine as a day trip. What a great idea! Everyone was keen….

Some months later, October in fact, we found ourselves preparing for the trip which coincided nicely with matts 50th birthday. The idea was to preorder the wine, go and pick it up then have a nice lunch. Texts were duly sent off to Matt to remind him to order and we looked at the lists to see what we would like. Time ran on and soon the order deadline was missed …. no problem though as they have loads of wine to choose from it would be OK.

The day trip planned was Sunday 16th October. The Friday arrived and we were all relaxed and looking forward to the trip with a nice coastal route planned. At a late hour Siobhan casually dropped in “is the warehouse open on a Sunday? It is France you know…..” well, it was bloody France and the shop would be shut, “well it’s not really about the wine is it” was my only reply. Thankfully matt had also forgotten to order anything so no harm done.

Sunday morning we were up at 5.15 to meet matt and family sans Gabriel at south Mimms for 6am, cold and dark, the heating in the car not working grumbles from everyone about what the hell we were doing. I think I was the only happy one awake.

Matt not knowing the details of his train turned up a little later than I would have liked, seemed pretty relaxed and we promptly made the journey to the tunnel where it transpired I had booked the earlier train to matts, a cold and tired Siobhan observed she could of had an extra 30 minutes sleep, so far so good……

Train was fine and we took a beautiful dry coastal drive to wimeraux a seaside town with charm and no coffee shops. Leo managed to almost fall in the sea with an unpleasant thud on his backside and a coffee shop was found.

Then it was off to Montruil via the motorway allowing us to give the cars a good run where we had a great lunch in a place called froggys tavern ra ra! The meal was huge and so good that one fairly large potato left with us for later, Matt took it.

 

By the end of a big lunch finished off with a very special fig tart it was time to walk, the kids needed to get out and run a bit. As we ventured out to the open it started to rain but being hardy we still strode out. This was not our sensible move as 30 minutes later we were all back at the cars soaked through.

A wet drive back to the tunnel commenced where we managed to get an earlier train despite matt and niamh getting stuck at passport behind a car containing, as matt called them “terrorists”. Niamh for some reason referred to them as Romanian, not really sure about that.

the rest of the day was simple and personally I had a good laugh. It was nice to catch up with the family and for the day.

All in all it was you could say a well conceived yet poorly executed away day. Next year will be Biturbo rally #2 I can’t see it being much better.