Toussaints vacation: Pau, part II

Our vacation plans hit a bit of a snag on the outskirts of Pau on the day we left Bedous. Earlier that day, we had visited the mill and had a wonderful lunch in a small mountain village with Laurent, wife Laurence, and daughter Léonie (unfortunately, son Corentin wasn't there because of his camp) . We had planned to drive to the Dordogne region of France and stay near the Lascaux caves for two nights. In fact, Laurence's family is from Dordogne and she and Laurent had given us some tips on things to see in the area.

As we were driving back through Pau, however, our little Opel had a bit of a problem. Suddenly, for no reason we could determine, the gear shift would not go into any gear except fifth. No amount of prodding seemed to help, so we called our insurance company -- for the second time in a month -- and they sent a tow truck. The sad-looking group in the picture were left, along with the photographer, waiting for a taxi after the tow-truck driver had taken our car away.

We went to the closest hotel we could find with vacancies, the Hotel Atlantic shown here. If you think it looks a little bit cheesy, then you're very perceptive! Betsy had a TV fall on her head, but otherwise we escaped the Atlantic without major injury.

After leaving Hotel Atlantic the next morning, we rode a bus into the center of Pau, killed the morning hanging out in a fast food restaurant with all of our luggage, and then marched to the nearest Axa office to stage an invasion (Axa is our insurance company). The woman we talked to got on the phone, explained that a couple of Americans had just come in with their children and all their luggage, and found an agent who could help us in English. That agent arranged for a rental car for us to drive from Pau to Olivet and also a taxi to pick us up at the Axa office and take us to the rental car place. Shocked that the insurance company would actually pay for all of this, we then called the Opel repair shop to get a diagnosis on our car.

The shop told us our transmission was not actually dead. There had merely been a "blocage" (some sort of a freezeup) that was apparently easy to fix. The car would be ready by 5:00, less than two hours from then. Come again?

So we called the helpful Axa agent back and said thanks, but we wouldn't need the rental car after all, but we would be happy to take the taxi to the Opel dealership. So we did, and after camping out in that lobby for a little more than an hour (they had miniature Opels for the kids to drive!), the car was fixed and we left. A little more than 400 miles later, we were back home in Olivet.

Even though we did not get a chance to see Dordogne, we felt fairly lucky that our car made the trip back home with us and that fixing it was not unbelievably expensive.

All in all, it had been a really good vacation.