Reply to "Le Mans Classic, as I remember it..."

Next morning we were on the road. Charlie, our friendly tour organizer had said the evening before that it was “wheels up” at 9:30. Not in the reception at 9:30, nor starting to pack at 9:30, but all paid for and car packed and ready to drive at 9:30. Fair enough, there has to be a bit of discipline when dealing with a group of that size. At 9:30, all were in the parking lot except Charlie, and we waited about an hour. Small detail with the hotel bill I believe, where the French had decided to go from one way of paying to another. Sometimes it seems like the French want to make the world stop, to hinder all progress for mankind. You can imagine the holler when Charlie finally arrived at the parking lot. Exact “wheels up” times were mostly ignored for the rest of the trip.

Then we visited some Chateau. Don’t expect to get from me the proper tourist rendition of what we visited, and this is not meant to put it down, because we visited beautiful Chateaus with interesting stories, but that’s just not my forte I suppose. And visiting Chateaus kept our wives from shopping for a few hours, not bad. But I’d rather write about the driving there. It was said once that owning a GT car means that “Getting there is more than half the fun”. I had to read that a few times, did it mean that a GT was half as fun? Of course not, it meant that the drive was a lot of fun, actually more fun than what you drove there for. Whether that applies here, is up to each individual. But driving in a line of Panteras instead of the usual crap cars back home is great. And to drive slowly through small quaint towns where the exhaust resonates on the castle walls and people gives you thumbs up is also great. Frankly we didn’t drive very fast, only a little above the limit, we were good citizens.