N45 50''28' E1 10''52'

Some days every thing seems to be going so well, however the fates don’t like you realising this and have a habit of conspiring against you!

 

This morning Chris had his first drive of the van. There were a few hairy moments for both of us to start with but he did really well and by lunch time we had got a good 100km under our belts. We therefore decided that we would skip the random town we had chosen to head for and make a long day of it with me taking over the driving and head on to our next planned stop, a beautiful lake up on the edge of the massif central that I had visited years ago (for Mum and Dads benefit we were going to Vassiviere and I was really looking forward to it).

 

So …. we were zooming along well on the dual carriageway into Limoges and looking forward to dinner by the lake when all of a sudden I felt the van start wobbling. I knew it wasn’t the wind, so started to slow and look for a place to pull off, when within seconds there was a horrible noise and the van took on a definite lean to the right. I slammed on everything (well gently stopped her) and luckily there was a bit of tarmac on the side of the road to pull into. We donned our high viz’s and got out to have a look.....and discovered a properly ruined tyre.

 

As we were on the side of a busy dual carriage way there was no way we were going to change it ourselves and so off I went to find the break down cover details, while chris put up the warning triangles. We spent a surprisingly jolly few hours sat on the side of the road, receiving sympathetic hoots from passing traffic, and were soon on our way again thanks to a helpful French mechanic who turned up and with smiles, nods, and a bit of gesturing got us on our way. The only slight hitch came when trying to explain our location as we were in the middle of no where, “somewhere on the D941…..near the D20 ….direction Limoges” but thanks to modern technology we also had our GPS co-ordinates.

 

As we no longer had a useful spare and the roads here seem to much more covered in sharp pointy things than back home we decided that we should stop at the next town for a few days and get things sorted. Sooo…out came the campsite book and to our relief discovered that there was a campsite in Limoges, only 8km down the road. This has turned out to be a lovely little site, and a haven after two hours of sitting on the side of a busy dual carriageway. Judging by the tourist info we were given Limoges looks like a nice place too, hopefully we will get a chance to find out after we get some new tyres tomorrow.