And now, back to your regularly scheduled video content, in which we document the things we check before and during our trips to make sure that the car isn’t going to kill us (or break unexpectedly during the journey). This is something we recommend you check on your own cars at least once every couple of weeks, and is very basic stuff that will prevent you from running into unforeseen engine problems or getting tickets for having non-functioning lights on your car:
Assuming you’ve just bought a car from North London and are planning on driving to France, you’ll want to know the best method of getting across the English Channel as quickly and as cheaply as possible. With a little bit of advanced planning and some luck, you can anticipate how long the drive and crossing will take or, in other words, exactly how absurdly late you’ll be up driving in a desperate attempt to reach your destination.
Escaping Leaving London is, as one would expect, slightly tedious. Most of this comes from the very old and unchanged road layout that gives the city its charms, but unfortunately is not particularly conducive to rapid travel to the periphery. Luckily, every region has major, well designed connecting roads that will usher you quickly and efficiently to the Motorway and specifically your end goal: the M25. These roads are well maintained and planned out, giving you many options to quickly get out of the city. You may find yourself confused at times as to which direction you are going: don’t worry, this is entirely normal and part of the advanced psychological preparation process employed by city planning engineers to help people get intimately familiar with every road in their area. If you find yourself driving seemingly at random then you’re surely on the right track and should soon encounter further obscure signage to help you on your way.
The M25 is by far the fastest and most efficient motorway in the northern hemisphere, with the exception of all others. Travelling this marvel of efficiency is both a pleasure and testament to British engineering prowess. You’ll quickly find yourself cruising along at a grand speed of almost nearly dozens of miles per hour at some points.
Some vehicles, unsuited for such endurance and speed, will find themselves abandoned in the middle of the road. This will result in being swiftly culled from the herd and ensconced in a safe area within a ring of traffic cones. These cars will be ushered quickly out of harm’s way, but only after a rigorous health and safety risk assessment has been performed to consider the implications of moving said vehicle the nearly 12 feet to the hard shoulder and out of the line of traffic. This generally shouldn’t take more than a few hours, giving you lots of time to admire and explore the beautiful North London countryside from the safety of your own stopped car. While you swiftly pass stopped vehicles, consider honking cheerily to wish their owners well. Many of your fellow motorists will be doing the same.
If you’re lucky, you might even get caught in one of London’s notorious and refreshing rain showers, kicking up road grime and quickly giving your windscreen a nice thick layer of grease to help remove any contact you might have with the outside world.
As everyone knows, all well engineered and rapid moving toll systems accept a variety of payment systems – ranging from contactless RFID systems and card payment to throwing coins into a receiver or dealing with a friendly attendant. Darford, in their infinite wisdom have managed to capture their niche market by tapping into olde England fantasy lore: doing away with any trappings of the 21st and late 20th centuries completely.
In fact, they’ve managed to actually find real bridge trolls to gainfully employ, liberating them from the wilds where they had been cast aside centuries ago. To those ends, these friendly and courteous attendants will gracefully accept any currency they recognize from their era, including and limited to: coin, bills, and animal sacrifice.
(We are of course aware that the Dartford crossing recently implemented a fast-pass RFID system which is of course completely suitable for those who can manage to tolerate a crossing more than once every several years, but since we didn’t have six months to wait for the RF token to arrive in the post, we had to make do)
If presented with a form of plastic currency such as card or credit, the attendant will generally grunt and shake his head awe, stating that such a payment method is unacceptable and, perhaps not even real. If you lack suitable ‘real’ currency to pay for the crossing, you can expect an informative and one-sided “conversation” wherein the attendant will respond to your lack of currency with repeated requests for coin. If you finally manage to convince the attendant that you in fact have no coin, then you will be given a bill slip to be paid unconditionally within the next seven days on pain of death.
If you’re travelling in the spring, summer, autumn or winter, you might be lucky enough to observe the painless experience of England’s professional and efficient road works teams. Since the roads to Dover are well used they of course need to be well maintained: this means diligent resurfacing works every 12 or perhaps even 6 months to keep the surface in top form. Helpful road attendants will keep traffic moving at a jolly pace. Unfortunately, it was recently mandated by law that motorists wave happily and toot horn at road crews to keep morale up, which means you’ll have to slow your vehicle while in any such construction zones.
The obsolete SpeedOne, constructed 1996.
I’ve mentioned before that the ferry trip from England to France used to be a quick and cheap affair. Modern technology had generally succeeded in revolutionizing the process of efficiently conveying large numbers of vehicles across the channel with relative ease and speed. Luckily in more recent times, saner minds have prevailed and have managed to completely expunge any option of a fast/cheap channel crossing by efficiently dealing with all competition and replacing them swiftly with one ferry operator cabal. Once again, we’re saved from facing a choice of crossing providers, long gone are SpeedFerries, the catamaran ferry and its hovercraft companion from HoverSpeed. Instead having been replaced with the much more sanely speeded classical ferry services of P&O, SeaFrance and DFDS Norfolkline.
The pinnacle of comfort, M/S Maersk Delft, constructed 2006.
Luckily, while these ferries may be somewhat slower than their extinct competition, they do offer a much more reasonable range of onboard entertainment ranging from the smell of vomit to the relaxing sounds of screaming children, all easily available for your pleasure and entertainment. In fact, so keen are they on providing such an outstanding quality of service, that they’ve taken measures to provide these services on all levels and in all areas of the vessel so you can be assured that you’ll be able to appreciate them no matter where you go on board.
Additional venues also include ‘massively overpriced cafeteria food’, ‘overcramped sitting areas’, ‘overpriced duty free’ and the ever popular ‘sitting on deck in the cold’ incase the previous aren’t to your satisfaction.
If you’ve watched our videos, and have never watched the WRC or similar rallies on TV before, or maybe even if you have, the subject of this post might be gibberish to you. I’m going to try to break it down (at a very high level, as many people have gone deep into the nitty-gritty of how pacenotes work before), and give a general overview of how our system works.
For us, we’re fans of the 7-1+HP numbering system, and as a driver I’m a fan of numbers first. “Numbers first” simply means that I want to know how severe a corner is before I know whether it’s a left or a right; my reasoning is simple – I can see the road in front of me, so if there’s a point where the pace notes get called as we’re approaching the turn, I can look at the road, see where it goes, and know from the notes how fast I should be going to not kill us both. Pacenotes, are very personal, and can be completely different, or even subtly different between each driver/co-driver team.
The 7-1 numbering system is loosely based on a relationship between gearing and corners, most modern stage rally cars have 6 or 7 gears, and so a 7 right would be flat-out in top gear. In the stock version of the 7-1 system, a 1 is a hairpin, but, because we like to use hairpins as frames of reference, we call them separately and reserve 1′s for something that would need 1st gear but isn’t a 180° turn.
In our specific system, we tuned it a little for road cars; it’s more of a 5-1+HP system – since our cars only have 5 gears -, and we felt that up or down translation of corners was somewhat confusing; a 7R would be 5th gear and ~10°, a 6R would be 5th gear and ~20°, a 5R would be 4th gear and ~40°. It quickly got complicated doing the mental translation… even explaining it just now was too complicated to do without cross checking against some diagrams.
Back when we were first figuring out what pace-note style we wanted to adopt, we tried 1-9+HP; 1=10°, 9=90°. This was fine, but equally confusing, as I was never particularly good at geometry in school, and visualizing 20° or 30° has never been a key part of my skill-set, which is somewhat funny given that I can fly – in flying at least, you have instruments to refer to.
So, the simplest way of understanding our system, is to translate the numbers to the gearbox, and equate that to a speed estimate; it also means that we’re in the correct gear for the exit of the corner too. The L or R quite simply denotes the direction the corner goes in. Right = R and Left = L. Simple.
Alright, so, that’s the small numbers and direction covered, what about the bigger numbers? Sticking to our subject as an example:
2R 50 means “2 Right followed by 50 meters” before the next thing that you need to worry about. 50 meters isn’t very long, and is usually the bare minimum unless we’re going through a series of things that aren’t close enough together to call for using one of the other methods to link them.
Got all that? Good. So, while we’re on the subject of distances between things – corners are not the only thing we need to worry about, there are also crests, jumps, fords, etc -, let’s cover the terminology for if these obstacles are close together; there are two: and (a) and into (->). Into tends to mean less than 50m but there’s a bit of a gap between the two obstacles. And simply means it’s immediately, so a 3L a 2R would mean a 3 Left followed immediately by a 2 Right… whereas a 3L into 2R would mean a 3 Left followed by a small gap then a 2 Right.
Other words and symbols are used too, if we’re unsure whether a corner is one thing or another and don’t want to find out when we get there, then it’ll be suffixed with the word ‘maybe’ (?), which simply means “be careful around this one”.
Still with me here? Okay, excellent, because I’m about to confuse you further.
Tightens, Opens, Plus and Minus. In our system, Tightens and Opens refers more to the road itself, and what happens during the corner (where the apex or apexes are), rather than that degree of the corner as a whole, whereas Plus and Minus loosely translate to go easy on this one, or keep your foot the floor (a 2L- would be between a 1 and 2, and a 2L+ would be between a 2 and a 3). Illustrations of what Tight/Open corners look like are below:
That’s pretty much all there is to it, obviously there are other features, crests – meaning something less than a jump, usually a rise in the road you can’t see beyond; think hidden dips -, jumps – which are obvious -, and many other hazards too numerous to mention. I’ll leave you now with the finally cut and uploaded video of Part 2 (if you were paying attention you’ve already seen this, but, this one has timings!), and a picture of what our map looked like after we’d scoured it for data, along with Azemute’s book full of notes.
Got any questions about pace-notes? Do you rally? Leave us a message in the comments!
In case you were wondering, and skipped straight to the bottom, the subject says:2 Right, 50 meters, 3 Left Maybe and 2 Right Plus over Bridge into this post!
At least 15% of the interior electrics had been replaced with house cable when I bought this, which is very low for a French car.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, I used to live in France; Normandie to be exact, for almost 5 years. During that time I owned a few different cars, and drove thousands of kilometers across the country regularly, culminating in a massive road trip covering Spain, Italy and most of France with my then girlfriend during the months of May & June. The scale of that trip wasn’t the same as this one for many reasons, not least of which the fact that my car in those days was French, and we took a longer time to complete it.
Except for a short overnight trip to Lille with some friends in my Saab last year, I’d never actually driven an English car in France before. It’s a very odd experience. As a cardinal rule, the French secretly don’t really like the English that much. All English people are lumped into the group of ‘Les Anglais’, and shown similar levels of respect on the road – not something that I’m used to as a holder of a driving license with “République Francaise Permis de Conduire” in big letters on the front. In fact, during the time I lived in France I treated Les Anglais the same way any other French driver did – with sheer contempt – so this is most likely some sort of karmic effect finally coming around to bite me.
This does not belong in a car.
Driving here is stressful in an English car; tailgating and general asshole-ish behaviour is the norm. I should point out here, that it’s only tailgating in France if you’d struggle to fit a piece of paper between the cars.
A few hundred km into the journey on this side of the channel got me back into my old groove of driving like a French person, which decreased the stress induced by driving here dramatically, and I’m sure caused a few confused looks on the faces of French drivers as they were about to vocalize their distaste.
A few pointers should you ever be in France and are getting tired of all the French drivers treating you like something slightly lower on the food-chain than pond-scum; written from the French perspective:
The most important things to note:
Hopefully you were able to detect most of the sarcasm in the above passages, but make no mistake, these are all valid manoeuvres that you will experience while travelling on french roads.
On a truly serious note, the best piece of advice I can give is this:
Seeking a campsite in advance in France is completely pointless: not because you may not know your end destination or how far you might be able to travel, but because you’ll miss out on a core French experience.
To optimally take advantage of this opportunity, you’ll have to drive for about 12 hours straight, right to the point where you’re starting to see ghosts on the road. At this point, pull off into the nearest city and blindly drive until you see your first campsite or sign:
1) If you see a convenient and close campsite upon entering your chosen destination do not under any circumstance try to make use of it. It is a trick or mirage of sorts and will vanish soon, potentially taking you with it. Instead, it is recommended to drive around randomly in an attempt to find a place to stay.
2) After about an hour and a half of pointlessly driving back roads you should be sufficiently frustrated and exhausted to sleep anywhere: safety, warmth or ambient light be damned. At this point, you can now seek out any sleeping arrangement that appears to be even remotely horizontal. Fortunately, by now the entire country should be completely shut-down, with all the locals out partying and drinking and making as much noise as physically possible.
3) Upon returning to the first site you found, you should inquire as to whether they have any space available. If you do this correctly you will get one of several responses ranging from simply being told they’re closed to being outright laughed at. Upon asking about alternatives, you will likely recieve the same advice.
4) After deciding that simply sleeping anywhere is preferable to falling asleep and having a serious accident, you should resort to hijacking the internet from a public source and searching blindly for an hour or two in an attempt to work out French laws on camping in public places and if there are any campsites that might possibly be open still at this absurdly late hour. Bonus points if you are stealing the internet from a campsite that has rejected your pleas to let you camp there.
5) Since the previous is obviously an attempt in vain, you should seek out an Aire de Service or similar refuge. Luckily, Aires tend to be well lit and busy traffic areas: both of which should make it as difficult as possible to actually sleep at. Obviously a plus for those who are massively exhausted, at this point you might want to undertake an attempt to convert your car into a campervan, although this is only advisable if you’re under four feet tall since you’ll soon realize that you simply cannot lay down that way unless you have a huge vehicle.
6) You will now resort to sleeping in the front seats (again), bringing your total contiguous time in the car into the 50 hour range. You may want to attempt a hybrid camping arrangement involving sleeping mats and sleeping bags, and then soon find that the humidity in the air and general heat is sufficient to make any such arrangement totally intollerable.
7) If you are truly lucky, you’ll wake up to a security guard tapping on your window and telling you to move along: this is a sure sign you’ve managed to actually get some sleep and are ready for another caffeine fueld day of driving at maximum speed to your destination! Enjoy!
/az
Hi and welcome to the first of Azemute’s guides to world travel and life at large. In this series, we’ll cover a broad range of aspects of travel and even more mundane life generally highlighting the way you shouldn’t do things.
In this article we’ll cover the basics of planning your dream trip to the South of France. Southern France, specifically the Pyrenees and Alps as well as the Côte D’azure.
1) Choose a time to travel
This is very important, timing your visit to the south of France will radically change your stay. Visiting in September through March will ensure you get the absolute maximum variance in weather: from heavy snowfall to torrential rains. Summer months have a bit more passive weather, generally being hotter and more humid. I personally recommend picking mid August for your optimal travel time: not only will this ensure you have to compete with the absolute maximum number of other travellers, but also that long parties and bright lights will keep you up all night, every night. Additionally, if you do choose August to visit, you’ll get the additional experience of competing with the french vacationers who have also planned their trips to the South in this month; this should present you with the opportunity to get the full experience of both an endurance competition as well as a race.
2) Decide on how long you’d like to stay
Choosing your travel times around two weekends will ensure you have to compete with the most road traffic possible, both heading down with all of the Parisians on their exodus from the city, as well as back. Additionally, since your trip will no doubt spiral out of control in terms of total milage you’d probably be best to suggest longer stays in fewer places. Chances are your suggestion will fall on deaf ears as the driver will decide to push on anyway in an effort to take in even more ‘fantastic looking’ roads dotted across the countryside, but at least you’ll be able to adjust your schedule to keep the distance per day semi-realistic.
3) Plan when you’d like to leave
Travelling from the UK to southern France is both a simple and painless affair; I recommend leaving late, preferably after working for at least a half day. Since the trip only takes some 28 hours of constant driving and covers a mere 1000 miles it shouldn’t present any problem to those highly skilled in iron-man style driving competitions or most endurance sports.
Since you’ll almost assuredly be travelling the English Channel by ferry, we recommend taking the last possible ferry on Thursday or Friday. This will give you ample opportunity to enjoy screaming children and cramped quarters. The ferry master may even inform you that laying down is prohibited because they’ve managed to completely pack the ferry full of people and thus there isn’t enough room. Don’t worry, this should fuel you with anger and rage which you can use as motivation to drive a further 6 hours in an attempt to get through Paris before rush hour so you can get to your first stop just south of it. No problem, you should be there by around 7AM: just in time for sunrise and a good night’s sleep.
4) Plan your route
Since the journey is both quick and painless, feel free to amend your route with every idea you can think of! For example, a last minute suggestion to drive through the middle of Paris will keep you at the top of your game as its one-way streets and confusing road layout are a notable challenge for even the most seasoned navigators and drivers. Using ‘La Peripherique’ is for the weak and the feeble, so you should make every attempt to take in the beauty and greatness of the full Paris experience (at 4am). At least the roads will be clear and the countless red lights will give you time to take in the scenery (and desperately try to get your bearings).
I can also recommend taking long detours to take in sights (and every possible road with a hairpin) on your way through the south of France: doing as much travelling through the French Pyrenees as possible, even in circuitous routes will give you ample opportunity to take in the full experience. Directness is a pointless undertaking, and your driver will take every chance to adjust the route to include every road with even vaguly interesting geometry. Finally, given the choice between fuel at an overly convinient ‘aire de service’ or finding a town off the motorway, always choose the latter: the 0.01 euro / litre is going to make great difference and the additional scenery you’ll take in is astounding.
5) Arriving
Since finding a place to stay is covered in other guides, this section is dedicated to getting the most out of your time in the South. The salty mediteranian air is extremely healthy and fresh feeling, and the moderate humidity and good temperatures make for very good beach weather. To that end, you should try and see as much of the coast as possible (from the saftey and comfort of the car). As HV put it: “We keep on the road: it’s safer that way”.
Your driver will have also no doubt now extended your trip to some nearly 4000km in an attempt to view as much coastal road and mountain pass as possible while minimizing the amount of time you have to suffer interacting with other people. If you travelled here for sightseeing, I recommend you plan your sights as near to the autoroute as possible so you’ll at least see them as they fly by at 130km/h. If you’re lucky, your driver will be reckless enough and spend as much time as possible overtaking people on the 40 meter straights between hairpins (going up a mountain at 30% grade, in a £180 car) that you’ll be able to make it to your campsite before they close at 7pm. Realistically you’d be better advised to just pack a lunch and drive straight through.
Hopefully this is enough to get you started planning your trip. If you have any questions or further insight, please feel free to share it in the commends!
Clear skies and safe travels,
/azemute
