Directile Dysfunction

It is a little known fact that almost all wars are started by the passenger of a car failing to navigate properly (“You want the next road on the left. Left. Go left!” “What, the cul-de-sac?” “No, I said ‘right’!”) with the subsequent fighting drawing in, at first, the local constabulary, then the world’s major superpowers.

To ensure peace and harmony on the way from St. Malo to Guilvinec (now that we know we’re not staying at Carnac) I thought it would be a good idea to nail down the route from boat to caravan. I will have my venerable sat-nav with me (a Nokia N770, thanks for asking), but as it got confused the last time I used it and told me I was still 9.6 miles from my friends’ house as I parked in their drive, I’m not at all sure I can trust it.

Google Maps suggests two routes: its preferred one goes south to Rennes then west, the other west to Guingcamp then south, a course which is both shorter and fractionally quicker. Bing Maps (Microsoft’s renamed Live Maps) suggests yet another way, heading south-west towards Lorient, which is shorter still but appears to be minor roads.

Which one is best goodness only knows – sometimes you really can have too much choice. I may have to let my sat-nav decide after all, even if we do run the risk of ending up in Dunstable.

Pack-man

The channel-crossing is shorter than feared and the beach no longer mandatory, so there is just one more thing preying on my mind: packing. In my opinion, it’s the worst thing about going on holiday; not only making sure I haven’t forgotten anything vital (like the anti-migraine drugs I failed to take with me on a recent business trip), but fitting it all in a suitcase.

The only person I know who takes pleasure in the activity is my mother-in-law, so it’s just as well she’s going.  However, as she is forever hiding our kitchen utensils “somewhere more suitable”, putting extra layers of clothing on her grandsons and always volunteering her present-wrapping services, I think she simply enjoys concealing one thing within another. (She is, after all, a mystery inside an enigma.)

Now, you may be aware that there will be seven of us shoe-horned into a Ford Galaxy; me, my wife, our two boys, my wife’s sister and my parents-in-law. I have recently looked through the rear windows of one – almost certainly being spotted doing so on CCTV  by the West Mercia Police – and if all the seats are in use it appears to have enough luggage space for two medium-sized suitcases and a thermos flask. You don’t need to be a world-class mathematician, or even Carol Vorderman, to work out that seven into two doesn’t go, especially when three of those people are women. Take my sister-in-law (please, we need the space) who could easily fill a large case with just a week’s supply of hair products. (Take two bottles into the shower? No way, I take 17!) In contrast, I only need a wet flannel to wash my hair, but then I am bald.

Anyway, the holiday has been sneaking up on me in exactly the same way as St. Valentines Day; I know it’s probably going to happen, I may even be vaguely aware of when, but it’s still something of a surprise when it actually arrives and the realisation dawns that I’ve done nothing about it. So, this time, I’m going to be like a good Boy Scout and be prepared – I’ll start packing the day before we sail, rather than the hour before.

Going by past experience, I will be allocated approximately 5% of my family’s suitcase, into which I must fit a host of electronic gadgetry (shaver, camera, mp3 player, sat-nav, netbook, smartphone etc, not to mention different chargers for each). It doesn’t leave a lot of room for anything else like clothes, so I will have to take one change of outfit and hope that the site has decent laundry facilities. My suggestion that I should buy a ‘mankini’ and wear that for the duration was met with a stony yet understandable silence.

I also feel I may have to be harsh with my boys as to what toys they can and can’t take with them: “What about this, Daddy?”, “I don’t know, what is it?”, “My trike and trailer”, “Mmm, I’ll see what I can do…”. I’m not very good at being harsh.

In the end I expect that everyone including the driver will have bags under their legs and cases on their laps for the entire journey. This promises to make our stay at the hotel caravan more comfortable, but at the cost of preventing any movement in the car, thus increasing the risk of deep vein thrombosis. Now, where did my mother-in-law put those anti-dvt compression stockings…

Why France?

This isn’t one of those bizarre and unanswerable questions along the lines of ‘how long is a piece of string’, ‘what do rocket scientists call something that’s really quite complex’ or ‘explain Piers Morgan’; this is about why I am going to north-western France.

There is a very good reason why the holiday consists of a week on a Breton beach sandwiched between sea-crossings, when it is widely known that I dislike both activities. And that reason is that my involvement was never intended. The original plan, I have recently found out, was for my in-laws to take The Boys abroad for a ‘vacances à la plage’ – a French bucket and spade holiday hopefully guaranteeing nicer weather than the Skegness equivalent- whilst my wife and I stayed at home on our own. They would throw up into the English Channel as they passed the Channel Islands, build sandcastles and say things like “I am Scotland” in pidgin Franglais, and we would go for days out to all the places we had wanted to visit but couldn’t because they weren’t suitable for small children.

However, when I was asked out of politeness if I wanted to go to France for a week, the parts about the sea, the sand and my staying at home were omitted, so I said «oui». Naturellement.

So, now I know what is in store, I’ll be spending most of the time in the hire car (or ‘tour bus’ as I am intending on calling it), as far from the sand as it’s possible to get on a peninsula – so: much the same as the unspoken Plan A, only with funnier verbal misunderstandings with the natives.

Carnac and Dinan: here we come. Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Castle: soon, I promise.

Stade Brestois 29

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am an ardent follower of the beautiful game, so I thought I would check out the Breton football teams. The nearest one to our holiday home is Stade Brestois 29, which hails from the city of Brest and is, somewhat amusingly for those schoolboys amongst us, rather lacking in support.

Despite currently languishing in Ligue 2, the club’s alumni include some illustrious, industrious and, indeed, international players:

Name	Notes
David Ginola	As famous for his looks as his ability, he was a supremely gifted but famously lazy winger, most notably of Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle Utd fame. Unfairly blamed by his awful national manager Gérard Houllier for France failing to qualify for the 1994 World Cup.  He is a housewives’ favourite now known for advertising hair-care products, coffee and cars. But only because he’s worth it.
Stéphane Guivarc’h	A striker who arrived at Newcastle Utd with a huge reputation and left after making just 4 appearances. The famous terrace song “Couldn’t score in a brothel” may well have been written with him in mind after he played all 7 games in the 1998 World Cup and failed to find the back of the net in any of them.
Bernard Lama	An almost comically ineffective goalkeeper, even Scottish keepers would point at him and laugh in derision. Dropped from the French national team just before the 1998 World Cup for smoking marijuana – which at least explained his couldn’t-care-less performances.
Claude Makélélé	The premier ‘holding midfielder’ of his generation, the position is now referred to by pundits the world over as ‘the Makélélé role’. Like all professional footballers of the last decade he has married a model several leagues above him in terms of looks. He has now retired from international football on at least three occasions and is on course to have more comebacks than Frank Sinclair Sinatra.
Franck Ribéry	From fairly highly rated attacking midfielder (but not good enough to have the position named ‘the Ribéry role’) to grossly over-valued attacking midfielder in just a few weeks, as his club, Bayern Munich, sought to ride on the tails of Cristiano Ronaldo’s £80m move by putting an even bigger price tag on his head. Fortunately, all the suitors saw through this ruse and pulled out of the running, saving themselves a cool £130m. A solid professional and recent convert to Islam, there is nothing funny to say about this guy, other than his surname sounding a bit like ‘rubbery’.

Vacation location elation

The mental image I had last week of my holiday is being slowly dismantled. First was the welcome news that we will be crossing La Manche from Poole instead of Portsmouth. This led, after some investigation, to the fact that we would be onboard a modern ‘FastCat’, rather than a more traditional monohulled ship. Now I have been informed that our base for the week, the Camping Village de la Plage at Carnac, is not actually anywhere near Carnac. It is, instead, near the not-very-similar-sounding-at-all resort of Guilvinec in the south-west corner of Brittany, some 139km (86 miles) by road from Carnac (or, if you are an Ancient Egyptian, 6106km or 3794 miles from Karnak). It is only a matter of time before someone lets slip that we won’t be going via St. Malo either, but will instead be alighting from the ship in Bilbao. Or worse, that I am not even invited.

If the holiday website is to be trusted (and I now see everything with disbelieving eyes), our accommodation will be a mobile home, although as I have seen no evidence of wheels in any of the photos, I lack confidence in their choice of the word ‘mobile’. We shall see just how easy it will be to relocate it should I get bored of the view. Perhaps it means it’s just about big enough for all of our cell-phones.

Most importantly though, is the promise of wi-fi access, although I can’t find whether it’s free and/or solely restricted to the main reception area. Whatever the case this will still be far more convenient than driving around trying to find a free hotspot at Le McDonald’s, and far cheaper than the spectacularly unreasonable £1.50/MB that 3 want to charge me for mobile internet access. Downloading some music from iTunes could cost more than the entire holiday, and that IS hard to believe.

Mental rental

Who would have thought that it would be so difficult to hire a car from a company that specializes in hiring cars?

“I’d like to hire a car for our holiday, please. It’s for Brittany.”

“Absolutely sir, what type would you like?”

“Four wheels, engine, doors. Oh, and air-con.”

“What size?”

“Erm, I don’t know. I wasn’t aware there were different sizes of air-con. Medium to large?”

“What size of car, sir?”

“Oh sorry. Well, five adults and two kids… a people carrier should do.”

“And where would you like to collect the vehicle?”

“Worthing.”

“Sorry sir, we don’t have any in Worthing. Can you get to Brighton?”

“Yes, I don’t see why not. The wife can give me a lift.”

“We don’t have any in Brighton either.”

“Okay. So was your question about getting to Brighton just friendly banter?”

“We don’t do friendly banter, sir, just cars.”

“Well, that’s open to debate.”

“Can you get to Oxford?”

“Technically yes, but it’s not exactly convenient. Don’t you have any somewhere nearer?”

“We have a mini-bus in Sheffield.”

“I meant nearer to Worthing, not your call centre. Do you have any other large cars in Worthing?”

“We can do you a Ford Ka, if you would like that.”

“Well, I guess we could could get five adults and two children in one of those, if we don’t take any luggage. Or children. At least it would take up less room in the ferry.”

“Ferry? I’m sorry sir, we have a strict policy forbidding cross-border travel.”

“Did you not think to mention that when I asked for a car for our trip to  France?”

“You never said anything about France, sir.”

“I did – I said it was for Brittany”

“I thought that might be your wife.”

“Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!!”

Sail – 50% off

Now that my in-laws have, for this weekend at least, become my live-in-laws, the holiday plans – hitherto a closely guarded secret – are coming more into focus.

Of most surprise (to me, at least, as everyone else seemed to be in full avail of the facts), is the news that we are not in fact sailing from Portsmouth, but from Poole; and not by conventional ferry but the so-called ‘FastCat’. This means that the crossing is no longer the stomach-churning and much-feared 9½ hours but a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 4½ hours.

The downside to this is that, unlike Brittany Ferries, Condor do not appear to have wifi on their feline ships, and with no 3G coverage I will be without internet access. So much for my grand plan of browsing, blogging and tweeting from the open seas – or ‘channel surfing’ as I would have called it.

The plan

On Saturday 29th August 2009, I, along with my family and in-laws, will be setting sail from Portsmouth on the 9 hour journey to St. Malo, prior to a week relaxing in Brittany.

As my children and in-laws enjoy the beach – weather permitting of course, what with my mother-in-law being a sun-worshipper of many years standing – my wife and I ( I don’t think I’ve written those words since I was drafting my wedding speech) will be off exploring and discovering for ourselves the delights of Lesser Britain, as it was known.

This blog, such as it is, will be my journal of the week.

Wish me ‘bon voyage’,
Toby