June 20th, evening.

June 20th, evening.

So it’s the end of June 20th now… we arrived in St. Amand train station and thought we’d have a cab waiting for us, no such luck, there was one cab there and it was waiting on someone else… so we put together some random French words and got the train station ticket guy to order us a cab. Ten minutes later we get a cab coming up to us, and lo and behold it’s the same cab from 20 minutes ago, she’d gone and done her last run and came back for us (yes I know we weren’t going to take women cabbies but we did what we had to do). After about a 20 minute cab drive we arrived at a very gothic chateau (of course after the lady took one wrong detour or two). It’s very cool, very old, well decorated, and just very old school feeling. I feel like I’m in a castle. The architecture style reminds Aaron much of the style that they are currently designing for the high end homes in Columbus, too bad we can’t write this off as a business trip!

So we got here and our “tour group” was out watching Friday practice, so we without really having had breakfast, or lunch because we were literally in the middle of no where in France (think Mid Ohio for those of you who have been, minus the race track and concessions, yeah nothing there)!. So I do they only thing I could do which was attempt sleep, lucky for me it worked, Aaron fell asleep for about 45 minutes as well, until this fly comes into our room and you would have thought it had a microphone attached to it cuz it was SO loud (I can only assume it was so loud because everything else was so quiet), anyway that woke Aaron up, he went on a mission to kill it; once he nabbed it he was too awake to go back to sleep, he made some bread and peanut butter lunch for us (yeah for grabbing bread at the quickie mart in Paris). I ate a piece and happily went back to sleep. Aaron explored the grounds of our chateau, he walked through the garden and explored the house it self. I say house loosely, mansion is more like it, and castle might even be the proper term! This place is HUGE! He found the library, and bunch of formal dining rooms, a terrace, a gazebo and tons of other very neat rooms with collections of stuff like cars, and “fabrage” eggs and the like. Just amazing. He also took some pictures and we’ll be sure to take some more. In the hall to our room the rafters are about 5.5 feet from the floor and Aaron has to duck to get through, but the ceilings them selves are very high. Very very neat!

Anyway back on the story, so about 3 hours after getting here I decide to wake up since I just couldn’t sleep anymore and Aaron told me about the grandeur of the place and how there are signs about getting “dressed” for dinner, and how a jacket and tie are compulsory for dinner…. I was freaked! We are back packing through Europe, be it not as basic as it sounds we certainly don’t have formal wear with us. I was having second thoughts about what kind of tour I had gotten our selves into and if we were going to blow all our money just to “keep up with the Jones’s” while eating dinner and such.

Thankfully when Steve our tour guide with F1tours.com arrived from practice he was able to clue us in that everything was going to be low key, true “Race fan style” phew! We met the other 6 people in our group, a family of four from Mississippi and a couple from Canada. The Canadian couple hit F1 in Indy every year it was an option as well as the Montreal grand prix, they also had been at Le Mans the week before, they had there with a tour as well. It was fun to share the experience we had versus theirs. The family from Mississippi was two college age sons and a husband and wife, the wife works for ING and had been asked to attend the GP from a hospitality perspective so they “made a trip of it/”

After enjoy juice and appetizers we all exchanged basics about the status of practice and such that we missed that day and then went to dinner. The place was a nice little restaurant in the middle of I don’t really know, being on the tour makes it so we don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on, and where we’re going, freedom in some sense but also a little disengaging at the same time.

We all couldn't read the menu, Steve spoke enough French to translate things, and we (Aaron and I were so thankful to not the be only “picky ones”) picked our meals. Aaron got a rumsteak, and I got turkey (or so I was told), though I think it was chicken and man was it good!

We had a good meal, enjoyed good company, and looked forward to enjoying practice and qualifying the next day.