Monte Carlo and Crash #3

Friday 9^th July

We set off for Monte Carlo about 08:45am – it took us two hours. Well, today was a day for the story books. (This post is all about ONE day). Nevertheless, I’ll start at the beginning. The journey to Monaco took two hours, the roads were clear but it had taken us an hour to reach the Autoroute at Frejus. After another delay, we found our way to the palace gardens car park and eventually to the small shopping area that surrounds the palace. Here, we bought respective parents’ scarves for presents, before stopping for a drink and some lunch at the same café we stopped at last year.  This is on the corner of the palace courtyard and the meal was fine.  I had a salami salad sandwich and a beer, Sue had a croque monsieur and a beer. I then had a coffee and Sue had another beer. This totalled less than 100 francs¹, not too bad for where we were. I wondered why everyone was queuing by the palace gates and only realised why when bang on 12:00pm there was a ceremonial changing of the guard. However, as we hadn’t yet paid and Sue had popped to the loo, I couldn’t leave the table to film it.² We did manage to catch the tail end of the ceremony though.  Hey ho. We then drove on to Eze, where we visited (the Fragonard) Perfumery and bought ‘Beautiful’ for Dorothy and some ‘Cacharel’ for me.  We then drove on to Cannes. The road was clear, as I’d found the non-town centre road and zipped along it to the autoroute exit and then zipped along between Nice and Cannes. Cannes is a very difficult town to understand from what the map displays; the bit we wanted to see, the bit we see on T.V. is in fact La Croisette on our map. Anyway, we spent an hour or so looking around the shops and finished by having ice creams. I had one with cherry ice, kiwi ice (nasty) and banana ice with cream and fruit².  Sue had her usual Colonel with Perrier and I had tea. 139 francs – whoops.  We then drove home. This took some time. We went via the autoroute and Le Muy but as we drove towards St. Maxime (almost there in fact), we were shunted from behind. We were in front of a five-car pile-up. Nothing could be done, the traffic was crawling along towards the roundabout, about ¼ mile away. No one was stationary, just crawling. However, I heard the bump as car #4 (we were car #1) ran into the back of car #3 with some velocity. Car #3 crunched into car #2 and car #2 ran into us – still with some force.  As I heard the bump, I watched all this in my rear-view mirror and stood hard on my brakes to take as much momentum out of the smash as possible. I was nevertheless, pushed into the car in front of me (let’s call that car #1+).  However, damage to that big old Merc (with tow bar) was so negligible that the driver just shrugged his shoulders and drove off. However, we had had a proper tup.  The gendarmes and pompiers were great and the girl who caused the smash (car #4) was very upset, but mainly, no one was hurt. We were allowed to drive on as ours was the only car not to have a damaged radiator. We made it back to the camp site and then called England for help/advice. We had a lousy meal at Fat Jaques before sitting down to write this. (The story continues in the next blog post). 1 – Around £11.00 https://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html 2 – 26 years on it sounds disgusting, I’d never eat those flavours now and certainly not that much.