Doug Shields and I arrived back in Palma on Monday 15 June after being at the Le Mans 24hr Race, which started at 3pm on the Sat and finished on Sunday at 3pm. Le Mans is about a 2 hour drive SW of Paris, depending on traffic, but it actually took me 4.5hrs to drive back to Orly airport due to traffic... and of course I missed my flight and had to get a later one.
What a fabulous experience to be there for this event.
We stayed in tents on a site across from the airport. This setup is done by a British couple and several of their mates. This group of people have been going to Le Mans for a number of years and they looked after us very well. It was one of the highlights that made Le Mans so enjoyable for us. The setup works well, as there is a bus that takes you to the front gate. It's amazing to see the amount of traffic, people camped everywhere - even on the roadside verges and roundabouts.
On the Saturday night a couple of the guys took us to a couple of spots on the track and to see the cars hurtling through the night was extraordinary... and at one position some of the cars were slowing down from speeds of 330kph. At the next position where the cars were braking to take a right hand corner caused a lot of excitement.
After a few hours sleep it was back to the track to watch the final hours of the race on the Sunday, and after being at the different spots the night before, it gave us a different perspective of the track and more of an idea of what was happening. The cars lap the 13.5k track during the 24hour race approximately 6000 times. In the Group Prototype "LM" P1 cars, the number 1 group (there are 4 groups of cars), the only thing that resembled the winning car was the Peugeot badge. David Brabham (son of Jack Brabham) was one of three drivers in the winning Peugeot. The website for checking out Le Mans is www.lemans.org. Of course I was hoping for an Aston Martin win, but their last win was 50 years ago. Maybe next year.
On arrival back in Palma it was time to get the boat ready for the trip to Tunisia. As usual this involved a number of jobs, including catering for 6 guys for 7 days away and preparing for the crew of Doug Shields, Jim Conway, Bill Reilly, John Bailey and Andrew Wilkinson and Greg Snowball.
We left Palma on June 19th and were back in Palma on Friday 26th June. We all enjoyed the trip to Tunisia and had a great trip there and back. We went into a port called Bizerte on the NE tip of Tunisia, about an hour's drive north of Tunis. Four of the crew had a car for the day to take them down to Tunis for a day's tour, which they all found interesting. We were held in Bizerte for about 3 days waiting for a weather window; thanks to www.passageweather.com we found our opening for the trip back to Palma. We had a quick ride down of 43hrs and coming back was 49hrs.
Very exciting to go into a foreign port, especially an Arab country port. Some "Gifts" were requested by certain officials and thanks to our shipping agent all was taken care of. We enjoyed the town and wandering around; we also liked the people and were not hassled at all. We had exceptional food in three different restaurants. Their second language is French and of course the French influence comes through in their food.
On arrival back in Palma on Friday night 26th June, Di and Robyn were at the dock to welcome us.