Plans

This lady in the airport looked like she was praying. It should have been me. Up at the crack of dawn to pack and splash enough cold water on my face that I could drive through the rain and the dark to the airport. With the hire car handed back and airport security negotiated, I almost headed straight to the champagne bar to relaunch the day.... Sense and 'lack-of-sleep-headache' prevailed and instead we sat by our gate to wait for the flight. All too soon we were boarding: off to Bristol to catch our connecting flight to Toulouse and out to dinner with our friends.....

<sound of stylus scraping over record>

Instead, we headed down the stairs until we could just see the plane.... and stopped. And then were told to come back upstairs and be 'unboarded'. Loitering near the desk, I heard one check-in lady say to another "That plane's going nowhere". So we adjourned to a cafe where the kids and I shared some snacks and Mr B plugged his laptop in and (so I thought) looked up alternative flight routes. How wrong I was. In fact he was looking up cars for sale in the area.

And so it was (long story short) that we headed back to the car rental centre that we had left a few hours earlier, and rented another car. And I drove back to Fife (just a few miles from our house) and Mr B bought a car. And of course we took the opportunity to pop home and overfill it with stuff we might like to take to France. (As an interlude, it might appear to those who follow these tales in detail that we are in fact moving to France one vehicle load at a time to spare the expense of a removal truck. If that is so, then I'm looking forward to seeing Mr B find something to take the grand piano....)

Involved in buying the car was the rental car breaking (one of the battery terminal connections popped off) so my journey back to Edinburgh was one of continually planning escape routes in case the power was cut off (taking with it, of course, power steering and brakes). Not entirely stress-free then.... With the rental car returned, we started the long, long, long journey south. It was very tempting to turn left at Carlisle and spend a warm comfortable night at my parents... particularly in view of what happened on Shap. We'd stopped to eat. And when we got back to the car, Mr B decided to be all responsible and check the oil. It was fine. I was surprised and delighted - he's never checked the oil before, that's always something I'm paranoid about and so I'm in charge of. I wish it had stayed that way. We couldn't get the bonnet shut. We tried with the tools we had (a penknife and swearing) and when that didn't work, Mr B bought a screwdriver and some WD40. And so in a blinding blizzard (Shap is high, and cold) we tried on our hands and knees to fix the car. After 30 minutes Mr B's hands were frozen so he went in to warm up. Instead of sitting in the car, I figured I'd just have one more go. And what do you know? It worked!

Anyway, more driving through rain, snow, hail, gales and finally we checked into a motel near the tunnel and, thanks to some very fast provision of extra linen from a very kind man, collapsed into bed.