Welcome to the "Your First Time at Le Mans" story series.
I decided to break this huge week+ long experience into smaller sized and self-contained stories you can read either in a sequence or in the order you prefer.
I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I did writing them!
Feel free to reply if you have any feedback, or if you had similar experiences and want to share. I read and get back to all replies.
If you really liked the article, it would be amazing for you to share with others who might also enjoy it!
Without further ado, today's story is:
Chapter 2: Road trip to Le Mans
Utrecht to Calais
Being my first time at Le Mans, I went with some buddies from the UK who have been going yearly for over a decade.
This means that on Monday June 9th I did not drive straight to Le Mans from my home in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I did a stop in Calais first, to meet my ferry offboarding friends.
They were arriving around 14:30 and I had about a 4 hour trip from home to the Carrefour where we were meeting. I started my journey around 10~10:30, so that accounting for some stops, I could arrive on time. Ended up arriving a bit later due to traffic, but nothing major.
Trip to Calais was quite uneventful. I stopped one or two times for a bathroom break and a coffee. The roads in the Netherlands are quite wide and well maintained. Boring, even, being very straight too and with the maximum speed during the day being 100 km/h. A bit over an hour after departure, I was already in Belgium.
The funniest thing is that even if there's a big blue sign that says "BelgiΓ«" when you cross the border, you would just notice it due to the asphalt quality change when crossing.
Being both countries in the EU, the border is virtually non-existent. No tolls, no controls, no nothing. Just continue driving as you were, notice the change in asphalt, signs design, and slowly declining amount of Netherlands plates while increasing the amount of Belgian plates.
Calais to Le Mans
After some hours we met with the guys at CitΓ© Europe, in a Carrefour supermarket parking.
We got our first big grocery shopping done, and after loading everything, we were ready for the second stint directly to Le Mans.
I was lent a walkie talkie so that we could communicate between the cars while on a convoy. I was not very much used to stronger British accents. On top of that, the "walkie talkie radio quality" didn't help my side of the understanding. But that is relevant for later.
The other two cars had the toll stickers for easy French tolls usage. For them it was much more important since they were right hand drive cars. This means that for tolls, they had to go out of the car and around to get the ticket or pay. So for me and my left hand drive car it was not much of an issue.
What was an issue was understanding how French tollbooths worked without knowing French or having been told about it previously.
How French tollbooths work
For this not to happen to you, I will tell you it's fairly easy once you know how it works. You have 2 toolbooths. On the "entry tollboth", you sort of "check into" the road you're about to pay for. There is a machine that gives you a ticket automatically (or by pressing a button). This marks your starting point. Don't misplace this.
Then you drive for a while, and eventually you'll get to a second, different kind of tollbooth. This is an "exit tollbooth", the "pay and checkout" one.
Here you input the ticket you got in the first one, pay, and continue. The usage of the entry ticket into the second tollbooth is how they know where you started and how much to charge.
Bear in mind that not all lanes in the tollbooth accept all payment methods. They have clear signing on top, if they accept cash, card or both. Choose accordingly to avoid being stuck in front of others.
Driving on the Mulsanne
After many hours of driving, we reached the Le Mans area.
As I mentioned before, due to my lack of practice mostly, and the lack of clarity due to the radio, I did not always fully understand what my friends said.
But words aren't the only things one can use to communicate. And in this case, it was not needed.
It was late at night, we were almost there. At one point I got a message. I didn't quite get it, but shortly after, one of my friends took their hand out of the window, made some devil horns and started agitating his arm.
I wasn't following 100% his intentions, and smiled at the situation. But at one point my mind clicked. Apparently all those years of video games worked on me, because all of the sudden, I was in a familiar place.
And then it hit me.
I was driving inside the circuit.
I was, with my own car, going through a part of the legendary Mulsanne straight.
I could not believe it.
I understood everything in an instant. The message, the hand sign. All pointed to one thing: send it. So I did.
It was a short burst, because we reached a roundabout and had to take a right into the Hippodrome entrance, but this was something I will never forget.
And bear in mind that parts of this circuit are public roads the rest of the year. During a Le Mans race, from around Tuesday, they are closed off for the event.
But since it was Monday night, we got the last moment of it open before the race.
Really magical.
And just like that, we arrived at the camp.
This is the end of "Chapter 2: Road trip to Le Mans". Stay tuned for "Chapter 3: Why go a week early?" in the upcoming days where we'll go over things like:
- 3 things you can miss, and
- 2 things that will be a worse experience
if you go later in the week.
See you there?
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