par les vous english - cuz I do and I wish everyone did!

So 7 hours of the 24 hours of the Le Mans race have passed by, we got to watch the start and probably the first 1.5 hour, then we listened to much of the race while driving around trying to find some lunch. Radio Le Mans is great! We were pretty much detoured out of any of the areas we would have liked to go though so instead we went back to downtown Lemans (the city, not the area of the race track) and found our selves in the same area we had been yesterday (where the drivers parade took place). It wasn't half as crazy as it had been the day before (more on that later). We had Mc Donalds (for the surety and comfort of knowing what we were ordering, and got salads instead of fries (people in France really seem to like fries, we got fries with our Omelets this morning with breakfast, we on the other hand had had enough of the fries).

Anyway... so we had lunch/dinner at Mc Donalds, which they are much cooler and hipper then our Mc Donalds, and then went back towards the track. We ended up by the Mulsanne straight. Parked on the side of the road, got out to attempt to watch from that area, lots and lots of cops were blocking the area by the track so we managed to stumble our way through convo with them to find out the details about where we could watch from....

after walking around a bunch of office/industrial type buildings we randomly come up on a HUGE campsite with probably 1000 people all lined up along fences and hillsides watching.... ahh the joy of stumbling upon JUST what one is looking for is so great.

We watched for about another hour, Aaron took some more great pics (will try to upload some in Paris, the internet here is really poop, comes and goes and is just not worth trying).
We then headed back home, happily fed, and sun burnt!

I have mixed feelings about the area, you factor in French Country side, where everything is very rural and people don't speak English so you feel stupid, but the area is beautiful and picturesque... and things like trying to find a pop machine or a store that is open past 5pm, but then you recall that for 76 years there has been this GREAT race that has been run here, and they really do a great job to "please the crowds" and appeal to the race fans... you see what I mean about being torn?

Today when the race started and I was on a hill side watching I was awe stuck to be sitting in France watching, it didn't feel like France then, it felt normal, with a billion (275 thousand they said on the radio) fans all in it for the same joy. I was really glad we made the trek then! Later in the day when I wanted a can of coke because I was hot and sweaty and everything was shut down, I wasn't quite as enchanted.

Anyway.... I haven't posted since London so this could become quite long but I would like to touch on the wonders of my view of the journey thus far.

We (an excited Simi, and a VERY sleep deprived grumpy Aaron) left London on Wednesday June 11th BRIGHT (yes at 4:45am in the morning it was bright, really weird, but nice) and early... we took the underground train from the 'burbs to downtown, where we hopped through French border patrol, and changed to Euro Star station the station St. Pancras is one of the nicest transport stations of ANY type I have seen, VERY state of the art, clean and just super nice... so trendy that when going to the bathroom I didn't realize where the stalls were due to the design of them ;).

Anyway hopped on the Euro Star, rode for about 2.5 hours seeing all kinds of country side... and got into Paris where we arrived at Paris Nord, a train station much more like what you would expect it to be, after stumbling around we located where our rental car was to be picked up from (you can read Aaron’s rendition of the picking up of the rental below). After an hour and a half, we had a map and an idea of where we were and where we wanted to be... and so we were off.

It was enjoyable to navigate via a map, though GPS would have been GREAT it wasn't offered with our car so we did what we could, we didn't get lost too much, but we still have to get back so we'll see how it all goes!

We arrived at our bed and breakfast after not much getting lost, realized that the hosts didn't speak as much English as we thought they did from our email exchanges with them... luckily we were able to make enough sense of each other to get by. We went in search of a meal for dinner, arrived at a cafe and the only thing on the menu that made sense was "Ham & Cheese Sandwiches” so we got those, chowed down and went back to the hotel. We found some English speaking blokes (Aaron has caught me saying things more “proper” trying to be British and made fun of me!) who were also going to the races, we chatted with them, got some inside info and that kind of thing. Called it a night kind of early cuz we knew we had a bunch of fun ahead of us.

So that was the end of Wednesday…. I still have Thursday, Friday & Saturday to get through but I don’t think that will happen tonight as it’s already 11pm and we MUST get to the track early tomorrow to secure good viewing locations for watching the end of the race (it will wrap up at 3pm but I think if we don’t have our seats by 11am or so we won’t be getting any). Next time we come, if we do I will for sure have to just give in and get grand stand seats so we aren’t fighting with other people for that extra inch of viewing space :D

More review of the French country side to come later… gotta turn off the laptop for now so we can use the single adapter plug we have to charge camera batteries.