Chilled or what!

We are now on the north coast of France.  To get up here we decided to cut up through the Vallee de la Sarthe.  We've not actually been to that region of France before and we can reccomend it as a wonderful holiday destination, but more about our sight-seeing later.  This is a blog about a little incident which happened while leaving the town we were staying in there.

We had decided on our morning of departure that instead of Peter nipping out in the car to fill up with fuel before we hooked the caravan up, we could do it on our way out of town.  There was a 'Super  U' supermarket we had walked to the day before so we knew there weren't any height restrictions getting into the car park.

We left a little later than originally planned as we'd stopped to talk at length to the owner of the site and a few other campers, but as our motto is 'there's no rush' it didn't bother us.

We pulled into the supermarket car park and round to the petrol pumps and that's where all the fun began.

There was a rather 'sharp right turn' as Emily-the sat nav would have described it, which also had a high kerb and a narrow passage into the parking area to re-fuel.

As Peter pulled into the re-fueling area there was a loud grating noise coming from the back of the van.

Now, because we had left later than envisioned, it was close to lunch time and the supermarket car park was becoming quite busy and  everybody had to exit past the entrance to the fuel pumps.
 
I got out of the car to see what the noise was to find the motormover (a mechanical device to move the caravan, which is permanently housed in front of both the caravan wheels) perched on the edge of the high kerb.

We were already taking up the space for two vehicles, but cars could squeeze past behind us to get out.

There was only one way to get off the kerb and that was to back off.  So while I held up the traffic Peter backed the car and van very slowly off the kerb.

We still had to get fuel so we tried again to pull over a little more to the left to clear the kerb.  Success!  But this time we were so close to the pumps that we couldn't take the caravan any further forward after we had filled with fuel or we would have lost the offside of the caravan.

In the meantime we had become a bit of a spectacle with some offers of help and a few raised arms and shrugged shoulders.

The only thing for it was to hold all the traffic up again and back completely out of the service station.  I went to pay at the kiosk and explain what we were going to do, by this time people were saying hello to Benji popping his head out of the car window and discussing our best way forward.

Peter held his nerve and while I stopped the traffic backed expertly out of the narrow situation we had got ourselves into.

As I got into the car we both laughed and said "well that was another first", maybe not to be repeated.  But what struck us the most was how calmly we had both dealt with it.  Neither of us fussed or flustered, neither of us cared how long it took us to sort the situation out and no-one got upset.  We can imagine we were possibly the talk of a few lunch-time conversations, and we probably haven't done a lot for Anglo-French relationships, especially if anyone was in a hurry, but we've learnt the French take most incidents like this with an air of que sera sera.   Fantastic!

Bucks Caravan Club members - you would have been proud of Pete!