Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Whilst yesterday we rebooked a room within 10 minutes of putting it onto the system, tomorrow that won’t happen no matter how low we price the rooms because the French will have all gone home.

The fact that they all go home at the same time creates chaos on all of the roads in France. Whilst we notice the French retreat from Spain, of course they are doing exactly the same thing all over Europe so that the roads in all directions are packed with cars and drivers who have been on the road far too long.

It kicks off from before dawn and will run well into the early hours of Sunday morning. It’s one of the days of the year when we get requests for breakfast at 6am (nope, it’s 8am at the very earliest) as the French usually take to the roads around dawn. Others go to the opposite end of the day and we’ve one family who are planning on setting out later this evening with the hope that the traffic will have tailed off by then (it won’t).

Definitely not a day when you would want to be on the road in France!

Actually, it’s not the last week of the holidays but the French don’t go on holiday in the last week so it’s the last week that they are on holiday.

Traffic isn’t quite the word we’re looking for either, as in many places the motorways are pretty much carparks rather than places where traffic actually moves. Many people think that they can avoid the snarlups by simply leaving the motorway when the traffic gets too heavy but, as you can see, a LOT of people think the same thing so you can look forward to tailbacks at every motorway exit.

But you’re thinking “ah, I’ll use my in car navigator and avoid the queues”. Well, no, that doesn’t work either as when the price of Tom Tom and the like dropped last year, loads of people bought them and you’ll see massive tail-backs on the recommended routes. They’re actually worse than the motorways as the navigation units tend to direct you along B roads which elsewhere would be fine but in France these are often quite windy roads and, in many cases, they’re just not up to coping with the traffic volume that the navigation units are now directing down them.

Your best plan is to find somewhere nice for today and tomorrow and stay there. Not only will this avoid needless aggravation on the roads but you’ll also miss out on the incredibly aggressive driving that this generates and indeed the corresponding jump in road accidents.

One of the things that make it hard to satisfy people is that often the view that two people will have of the very same room can be completely different.

For instance, yesterday one couple checked out saying that the room was dreadful, it was noisy and the bed was so bad that they didn’t get to sleep all night.

This morning, another couple checked out of the same room saying that everything was absolutely perfect.

In another room, we have a bed which we’re planning on replacing once we get ourselves sorted out with a new car yet a number of people have said that it’s the best bed they’ve ever slept in.

The last time I flew on Aer Lingus it was way, way back in the mid 1980s and we only went with them because the alternative was actually going bust at the time.

Now, 20 odd years on and I book with them for next Wednesday and, guess what?, yup, that’s the very day that they might be going on strike!

Bit of a peculiar strike though. I gather that the Irish pilots are planning the strike because Aer Lingus is intending to start recruiting pilots from Northern Ireland. Now, that leaves them with an interesting dilema because they can’t back down from recruiting in NI as those pilots in NI would have quite a strong legal case for taking them to court for discrimination on the basis of nationality which is illegal under European law.

Oh well, perhaps I’ll try them again in another 20 odd years…

The French, by and large, take all their holidays between July 14th and August 18th (ie the penultimate Saturday in August).

This causes endless hassles for everyone in the accommodation industry in France. For one thing, just about everywhere is running at full capacity right up to August 18th and then all of a sudden they can be virtually empty. Stocking up is consequently a nightmare as on one hand you don’t want to run out of stuff, on the other hand you don’t want to be left with loads of perishables on August 19th.

The effect on the cash & carry is peculiar. Metro locally have truly awful stock control so now that the bulk of the holiday season is out of the way they now have the little soaps in stock which haven’t been on the shelves anytime since early July. You can tell that we’re not quite at the end of the main holiday season though because they still haven’t got any of the little bottles of shampoo and instead are still sitting with the same 20 boxes of body lotion (I was very tempted to mark the boxes to confirm that they are the same ones that have been there since June).

Anyway, one useful side-effect of this peculiar behaviour of the French is that a lot of places like ourselves can actually close for the final week of August and lose virtually no business.

Where’s everyone else though? Who knows? The English do keep coming during that final week in August and by the first week in September things are getting back to normal with the usual blip locally caused by the Visa pour L’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan and various other events around the country designed to sort things out.

However, by mid-September the bulk of beach resorts are starting to close down for the Winter, despite there being high numbers of tourists (but few French ones) around locally until well into October.