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Soongies' Great Adventure
The main aim of today was to get the winter tyres put on the car. It was a pretty wet day so it was a good day to be doing boring jobs like this! We thought a trip to the Peugeot garage would be a good start – they were bound to have the winter tyres for our car considering our car is a Peugeot – wrong! They didn't have our tyres and the guy rang the main Peugeot garage who also didn’t have any. Plan B was to try Speedy – a garage chain in France that seems to be relatively cheap. When we got there, we asked the guy if he knew much English – he didn’t. Luckily Kate did year 12 french so she was miraculously able to communicate with him. Initially he said he wasn’t able to put the tyres on until tomorrow but then he must have seen the look of sadness on Kate’s face (as we needed it done today) and he managed to book us in at 4:00 today. What a relief! Then we had to work out what we would do with the summer tyres that were going to be removed in a few hours. We decided that the best option would be to courier the tyres to Holland (where our friends, Jeroen and Rianne live and where we are returning the car on 19th March). But how were we going to arrange this speaking French?? It is very rare to find people who speak English in France! When we were leaving the Speedy garage, we saw a courier van called Boomerang-Transport and there was a guy sitting in there. So Kate asked him, in French (as he also indicated he didn’t know English) if they deliver to Holland – yes they did but we would need to look at the website. We decided the best option would be to go to the Boomerang office – a half hour drive away. They were very friendly at Boomerang and they spoke a little bit of English. After they did some research, we decided to look into other courier company options as we were going to have to pick up the tyres from speedy the next morning and bring them to Boomerang. We weren’t even sure the tyres would fit in our car! We had seen FedEx on the way to Boomerang so we popped in there. They spoke less English here but they were still very helpful. If we were to organise anything, it had to be done over the phone though. Thankfully they let us borrow their phone (as the UK sims in our phones don’t allow us to call international) and after a VERY long phone call it was all organised (and our bank account was slowly depreciating!) – FedEx would pick up our tyres from Speedy tomorrow afternoon and take them to Holland. By this stage, we were starving. We also realised we needed to buy a powerbank for our phones. So we stopped off at Decathlon which was only 10 mins away so Kate souls look at more shoes (which she did buy!). Luckily there was a restaurant (CourtePaille) right there too. We didn’t really care where we were eating – as long as we got to eat. There was free bread (of course – there is free bread at all the restaurants) and then Kate had a typical French plate of cold meats, bread and cheese while Calvin had chicken and vegetables. We also bought some chocolate to give to the Speedy guy for fitting us in today (we were so grateful). We decided that we would give ourselves plenty of time to get to the garage as we didn’t want to miss our very important 4:00 appointment. We got there with plenty of time to spare. Once we had our car with winter tyres on, we drove back to our accommodation and then later on walked the very short distance (maybe 50 metres at the most) to a nice restaurant for dinner at L'Espirit Bistrot Vaise. Unfortunately Kate was coming down with another cold so she didn’t have the biggest appetite. We had an entrée and main and because Calvin had booked online on La Fourchette, we got 30% off!
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