just about to leave turin and finally managed to upload a severly resized and culled out 250+ photos
finally able to make an entry – sitting in an internet cafe in millau, and of course french keyboards have to be laid out just that little but different to make things difficult. anyhoo (sorry for lack of pictures but will probably have to wait a week until I get to croatia to fix that)
23rd – arrived at Charles De Gaulle just before 7am paris time, took less than an hour to get off the plane and out of the customs area: reason being some border police guy just looked at my passport and didnt stamp it or anything then i picked up my bags and walked out no customs search or anything! waited an hour to meet up with dad who had the same thing, next to no checks…weird
got the car, had to do several loops of a motorway interchange before we could find the hotel then got there and end up crashing out for about 15 hours.
24th – paris
went to the natural history musem which was nice, beuatiful gardens with 1000′s of species of plants and then a really good darwinian evolution exhibition inside. from there went and walked to all the sites notre dane, the louvre, up the champs d’elysee to the arc de triomph then to the eiffel tower by which time I was pretty sick of the place. some of the palaces did have real bling gates though.
25th – escape from paris
got out of town without too much drama and headed south. the country for the next 200km was pretty much flat everwhere. loads of huge power lines and heaps of windmills though. we ended up on not exactly the right motorway so had to do a detour after luch. bingo good detour – ended up driving along the loire river and came across a picturebook 14th century castle, towers moat etc. etc. awesomes. found a nice secluded campground near gien and got a much better nights sleep in the tent than in the crappy airconditioned hotel room.
26th – gien to millau
really good day. spent the morning stickting to backroads in the countryside along the loire river then a canal paralell to it, got to have a conversation with an actual frenchman when we stopped for coffe in a little town i didnt get the name of then headed for the A75 south of clermont ferrand. really great motoray through the central massif pretty much huge vistas 360 degrees around – made me realise yeah this is quite a big bigger than NZ when I think this is only a sliver of the country. got a view of the viaduct before turning off the motorway and heading into millau. get to the campground there and the guy at the desk says theres a big party down the road tonight that i should check out, ok sounds good. in town having lunch and so,e things arent so differnt to NZ – theres a guy doing laps of the main street in a sacked out mercedes…..
the “party” it turns out is the millau “natural games” (read x games etc.) and there was a free concert first some french alt rock band doing covers and maybe some originals – the singer looked like a french african iggy pop which was amusing. then there was some guys doing fmx type jumps and flips on moutain bikes followed by a hiphop group called beat assailant (mayabe american, as all the songs and accent was, but the singer could speak french also) 10 piece with brass, not my thing usually but they put on a good performance and the crowd of about 5000 was into it.
27th – the viaduct
went on a tour of the viduct today and got lots of photos – its really big and stuff the deck is 245m high and the to of the towers almost 345m. saw some guys doing downhill mtb around the place too. got back to town and found they have a man made rapids thing where an event was going on too. so been pretty good so far. still taking lots of pics so will have a mass update when I can get a good enough internet connection.
au revoir
Made it this far ok – well by ok I mean feeling decidedly average. Only got 4 hours sleep the night before and the usual last minute stress mean I got on the auckland-singapore flight with bleary eyes and headache – I guess getting off in singapore with only bleary eyes and a headache then isn’t too bad really. and heres photo number 1, was a pretty nice clear veiw of the manukau heads over the top of some airnz plane. Anyways time to sit around at changi for four hours then hop on the big airbus to paris.
Almost there now, should be a few kg under the limit. Just have to charge all the batteries, double check I have everything I really must have and try and get a few more phrases phrases of various languages committed to memory!
Leaving Auckland on Monday 22nd June and flying in to Paris via Singapore
A couple of nights near Paris, picking up a eurolease pug and then traveling to Torino via Millau (have time to kill and theres a really really big bridge there so why not). A couple of days in Torino then stopping near lake como on the way to Trento through the foothills of the alps. 3 days in Trento checking out a round of the European hillclimb championships.
Then off to Croatia for a month meeting relatives in all parts and generally having a holiday.
The plan from there is still a little hazy, I need to get from Croatia to Yorkshire in the UK where I am going on secondment to work in a power station over there for three months (starting 10th August) I need to decide in the next few days if this will be by a direct flight from Dubrovnik to Leeds or going overland.
