DIPSTICK PETER MOORE
When you venture into another country with just a tiny fluency in the local language and no knowledge of the layout except general perceptions from a couple of maps, there are a few challenges ahead.
In March 2019, I entered France from Geneva with a first stop in Lyon. Food and wine were the primary purpose for travel and having just cracked 70 ans, my eyes were wide open and new rubber in the neck joints, ready to see as much as I could comprehend. I had already booked my first cooking class from Oz and I would rely on train bus and careful stumbling to get me around having correctly concluded that if travelling alone, driving on the right would get me into real trouble at the first intersection or roundabout I came too.
As I moved around, enjoying the world around me, wondering about the military patrols passing by (goggle Operation Sentinelle, it is still happening) and savouring both everyday tucker and some very special morsels together with a little Beaujolais (this wine producing region is just a little north of Lyon) I had to accept that constant movement tires the bod a little faster these days so I would stumble into the occasional newsagent looking for something to read. All the usual English classic car mags were available but in French so no fun, Then I found the first of my specialist Citroen 2CV mags focused on the usual glorification of a particular old car and how many times they can be photographed in different colours in various parts of the World but also with significant tech advice and repair sections with detailed advice and instructions. I took this one back to my room, pulled out my pocket dictionary and entered the realm of what I realised later would become Pete’s Citroen 19 disease. This experience also directed my focus for the trip to wider realms than just food and plonk which I had come for. The plonk did however help lubricate my private research on matter Citroen until sleep prevailed.
I had my circuit which I had generally sketched out of Lyon – Toulouse – Bordeaux – Belle Isle – Brittany – Reims – Mulhouse – somewhere in Burgundy then depart for Geneva and home after about 7 weeks. I had no pre-arranged tours lined up just make it up as you go and let the IPad be my planning guide.
Without getting any deeper into the travel guide, the magazine did rekindle my interest in seeing how things work – a fairly simple line but becoming enthralling when your guide shows you the technical aspects of a town, a winery, how a region developed before and during the Industrial Revolution and into the 20th century.
Goodies along the way included a tour of the Airbus factory in Toulouse (the A380 production was just being finished off) and arriving in Bordeaux to quite a few wine tours, a better appreciation of the consumption of dark chocolate with certain red wines (sorry, no cars yet), submarine pens and more wine tasting and finally closer association with the gendarmes after my mobile with about 3 weeks of photos on board was stolen.
Wandering around the old city area of Bordeaux I found the fabled” Falling Car of Bordeaux”. I have described this to some Dipsticks but worth Googling for location, presentation and the actual question of Why.
Belle Isle followed (bit of art history for Pete – google the Australian artist John Russell) then into deepest darkest Brittany for a weeklong live-in cooking course which left me with a couple of weeks to head East across country to Reims and then south east and south back to Lyon and home. Ahh, the wine, the bubbles, excellent food including rarish beef, bunny rabbit and more. What a grand experience. I can tell you now I actually stood at one point about 3 metres away from Romanee-Conti vines in Burgundy – the most expensive and some would say the epitome of a priceless wine it is so expensive.
But prior to Reims I had tried to find whether it would be possible to check out the Renault Alpine factory in Dieppe and the Peugeot factory and Museum in Sochaux. Damn and blast, Dieppe did not want to know me (Non, monsieur!) and the fiddling around to get into Sochaux with time running a bit short would be too much of a hassle so I would have to concentrate on Mulhouse (Mooloose to the locals)
In Reims, I found a private collection called the Museum Automobile Reims-Champagne housed in an old warehouse area complete with the odd pigeon and a few sparrows. It was not the tourist trap of many such places but offered a very accessible display of many cars and motorcycles, many owned by private citizens and on loan to the museum. The exceedingly small shop area for this site also provided a small model Peugeot 404 intended to excite one of our members. Oops, sorry about that!
Sitting on a train googling the town/city and on my iPad, I focused on the Cite de l’Automobile which has absorbed the Schlumpf Collection. I already knew the Schlumpf cars to be one of the finest Bugatti collections in the World. This proved to be the case but the most interesting part for me was not the acres of bright shiny cars you could not get too close to but the Discovery Area which displayed the make up of the engines, chassis and timber framework for the bodies. An astounding display.
However, Mulhouse also is the home for another museum run by the same parent organisation as the Cite de l’Automobile, this being the Cite du Train, something I did not know of and thought might be worth seeing. Wow, what a place. In many respects it was much better than the car museum by the manner of the display, the information available and the fact you could walk through many of the exhibits and literally, nose on window, see into such things as the Presidential carriages (3 of, I think) including their private bedrooms, dining areas and dedicated kitchens. One of the railcars designed by Bugatti and fitted with I believe 4 x transversely mounted motors of the type fitted to the Bugatti Royale. Another display was a steam engine apparently blown off its tracks by Maquis explosives as a demonstration of what the Resistance got up to in WW2. And finally, before you get into the model area and the toy trains, you pass through a small theatrette showing a loop of film footage on 4 large screens of the highspeed testing of a TGV train. When the camera on the digital speed gauge ticks over 574kph and the Supervisor behind the driver taps the driver on the shoulder to indicate enough is enough, you realise that the 310kph speed indicator you have already seen on a couple of these trains in your travels so far is well below the maximum possible for these beasts, you feel a great deal of comfort in the design and what you have just experienced.
This museum is not to be missed but give yourself a few hours to do it justice. If you are a train afficianado, allow a full day!
I was travelling basically in the northern hemisphere Spring. It was often raining or drizzling, and temperatures did not get any higher than maybe 15-17 degrees. I fluked Belle Isle where it was blustery but clear weather on an island off the coast in the Bay of Biscay and perfect weather for the venture. Yes, bloody tourists around but not too many. France was expecting 100 million tourists in 2020 but Covid happened. You visit with the masses or try to avoid them as I sought to do.
I do recommend checking out the websites for the activities mentioned above if you are contemplating France in a couple of years from now.
Au revoir,
Pierre +
Comments