Day 91 - Dunkirk to Luxembourg - A spot of shopping.

I rose at 07:00 after a really good sleep and after a quick catch up on emails that had arrived since I fell asleep and with not having breakfast this allowed me to do a fair bit before I met up with my UK colleague and we set off at 08:30 to Mardyck for a usual work meeting.

With that concluded before 10:00 we were on the road and heading toward Lille, this was a bit worrying as we were supposed to be heading toward Luxembourg but I didn’t want to give the impression I didn’t trust the sat nav so we soldiered on. 

My colleague kept me abreast of the important sites of world war one and kept shouting, what to me were random French names but to him were famous areas of battles.  I have to admit I learned quite a bit, for instance the battle of the bulge was between Dunkirk and Luxembourg and I thought that was Custer’s last stand.  But that was not all I then was treated to a brief appraise of the battle of Waterloo as we passed the town of Waterloo.  I didn’t realise this was a real place and again I am going to sound thick but I thought that was a sea battle but I seemed to have got mixed up with Trafalgar, apparently. 

After travelling about one hundred and fifty miles and with the sat nav showing a further one hundred to go we took a break, I may not know about world war one battlegrounds but I did know that you are suppose to pay when you go to a toilet in a French service station and therefore needed change before you go in.  So there you go not so thick on common sense items.  We took the chance to grab some human fuel before getting back on the road and as we headed closer to Luxembourg we got a change of plan and had to re calculate the old sat nav and go to another location in Luxembourg and pick up some equipment and deposit them in Esch.  You would honestly thought we were dropping off a pile of dog do do, as the difficulty we had in getting someone to accept the equipment it was amazing.  It took about thirty minutes to get someone to actually take it off our hands before we could then head back to the centre of Luxembourg and to our hotel.

However we then decided to detour a little more as we found a rather large supermarket and chose to have a look inside.  As we are driving for a change my colleague wanted a chance to get a few bottles of wine as normally on the plane you can’t take anything like that back.  As I was looking around I saw some AC/DC Beer (which is a heavy rock group).  So I thought I would get a couple of cans for my son who has already tried trooper beer (Iron Maiden’s beer).  It would be a nice surprise.  As I have got him something I thought I better get something for my son in law and daughter so get them some nice Animal biscuits.  I know what you are thinking and assuming that now I have put it here then it will spoil the surprise, well as they don’t read this it doesn’t matter.  I could drop a bombshell like hi kids do you know that your all adopted and they would be none the wiser.  Just for the record there not, if they were they would have been given back a long time ago.

Also in the supermarket I like looking at the different foodstuffs they have on offer, I don’t think I could ever try most of them but they are interesting to see.  For example today we saw what I think were Octopus legs, no body or head or whatever the big lump is but the legs looked just like octopus and it was been served in the sea food section.  Another area that is always impressive, and I think I have said this in a previous blog but the continentals do superb looking cakes, I can’t understand why people aren’t being rolled around being too fat to walk when you consider how inviting it all looks.  Just goes to show they must all have terrific will power or a cake allergy.

The other really strange thing was the car park, they had a vast underground car park that was absolutely immaculate, nothing out of place, not one scrap of litter about, not one lightbulb not working.  The floor where the cars drove were all painted and not one tire mark of any kind was visible.  My colleague made a comment that they wonder if it was painted every night as we had never seen a cleaner or nicer car park.  Try to imagine two Brits stood looking in awe at a car park and then try to imagine a lot of local stood shaking their heads looking at two Brits.

So finally at 18:30 we checked in at the hotel and I have spent the last four hours catching up, once again, on emails etc.  I seem to spend most of the day doing stuff and then every night working, but I am not complaining as I think a normal nine to five would kill me.

Tomorrow the plan is that I have a few meetings in the building next to the hotel so I won’t need to go out travelling all being well.  So after just short of 600 miles so far this week a day off from driving will be a change.

Anyway that’s all for now as I wanted to get this published before doing a couple of other things for work and then getting hopefully another good night sleep.

So for now, night all