22 Hours - Phase II: The Car & Stuck in England

Here's the second installment of my recent eventful trip to lovely England. The first entry is here: Part I: Getting In.

So, British customs, in their infinite wisdom let me exit the airport. We meet our contact, Ted, who is going to bring us to the company and to look at the car. Ted's brother, Paul will also meet us at the company and we will get down to business.

Ted, Franck and I laugh a bit about the issues that we had getting in. Then Ted asks us what our plan was...We told him that assuming the car was as expected, we were going to take the car and drive it back down to Bordeaux. Ted laughed. A few minutes later he asked if either of us had driven a limo before. We said no. Ted laughed. Ted asked us if we had ever driven a box truck before, because it was about the same size. We said no. Ted laughed. It was becoming a bit disarming the fact that he was laughing about all of these things. Ted asked us if we knew how long the car was. We told him that we thought we did, but asked him to confirm the size. Ted said "big" and...he laughed.

Finally we get to the office, and we notice that the driveway is a bit "difficult" to navigate. Ted told us that he would have someone help us pull the car out. We meet with Paul and then we look at the car. For me it was a normal sized limo - a Town Car with a 120" stretch. However, Franck thought that the car was smaller. The entire car came out to be 8.5 meters long and Franck thought that it would be 7-7.2 meters. He started looking over the car and started to get cold feet. He started wondering how we were going to get the car to the highway. How we were going to drive it to the train station to take the chunnel. How we were going to get it on the train. How we were going to clear customs to get into France. We started thinking more and more and I (while fairly unemotional about the whole episode - like I told the customs agents, I was there for translation and companionship purposes only) started to imagine seeing us discussing with customs officials for the second time in one day what "business" we had going into a country. If they blocked the car in Calais, we were really going to be in bad shape.

Long story short, after consultations between England and France, the conclusion was, without more knowledge, the risk was too great to leave almost 10,000 euros for a car that may become a big paperweight in France.

Ok great. We are now in Southampton. We have no return ticket. We have no idea what is in this town - is it big, is it small? We had no idea of anything. The only thing we did know was that there was no return flight from Southampton to Bordeaux before Thursday (it was about 4 pm on a Tuesday). Upon further research, the easiest thing to do was take a flight from Southampton to Bergerac, which is about 1 hour from Bordeaux. The problem was that this flight didn't leave until the next day at 11:40. So we were stuck in Southampton for the night. With nothing but the clothes on our backs and a toothbrush each. We then realized that England was playing their world cup match against Sweden and we thought, hey we'll be able to watch the game with the English.

Wow! These guys are really crazy about their footie. We go to the pub at 6pm (the match started at 8pm) to have a few drinks and try to eat (a small side note, English food is as bad as you've heard). The pub was maybe half full when we got in there, and it slowly but steadily filled up. By 7:30 it was full of screaming, and I mean screaming, hooligans. Every single play was cause for booing or cheering. I guess it's like watching the super bowl in a fan's bar in one of the cities whose team is playing. But this is on a country-wide scale. I can think of no sporting even equivalent in the US with this type of support.

In the end we spend the night in a cheap (but expensive) hotel, took the flight in the morning and got back this afternoon. It wasn't very productive, but I had a bit of fun, got out of Bordeaux and learned that there may be easier ways to buy a car.