We have almost devotional belief in Waze. The navigation system. The one used by Uber, by all the driverless cars coming soon and everybody who ever wants to get anywhere. Which I’ll admit, excludes about 90% of road users who drive like they never want to get anywhere. But as we always say: in Waze we trust.

It started life in Israel. Oh. My. God. Better sanction it! Delete the app!!! It’s a genocidal route-finder!!! Anyway, someone said ‘you must get Waze, it’s brilliant’. So I downloaded it, about 15 years ago, in a coffee shop in Rishon-le-Zion (everyone remembers EXACTLY where they were when they downloaded Waze.) And it was brilliant. But all the street names on the maps were written in hebrew. Oh. Never mind, like all good Jewish boys, I can read hebrew perfectly. Just can’t speak it. A year or two later it arrived in the UK and about 5 years after that it was swallowed by Google. Who probably paid the usual 634 billion, trillion, zillion dollars for it.

And Waze had taken us from Calais to Le Touquet, on various road trips, over to Deauville, and its final task was to get us back to Calais for Le Shuttle. I checked the route over the preceding days. Obsessively. To see time differences. And it always said “2 hours 47 minutes”. IF… you take the toll roads. You can take the ‘free’ roads, save 11 Euros and it takes 3 days. Ok, maybe 3.5 hours. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested. If it’s faster, there’s no price not to be paid. Other than speeding fines, obvs.

So we had our breakfast in this morning and hit the road. Let’s rock and-fucking-ROLL!!!

Twenty minutes later we’re on dirt tracks, going over speed bumps, following a massive tractor. Ok, stop, re-set Waze. THE TOLL ROADS!!! WE WANT TO PAY AS MUCH AS WE CAN!!!!

And we ended up in some industrial town filled with lorries and with 17 sets of traffic lights; all red. I counted them. I had plenty of time to count…

Eventually we found a toll road and whizzed along at 81mph. Yes, that’s the legal limit there, faster than ours. Ok, if I hit 85 or 88 at times, my ‘navigator’ informed me pretty sharpish. Thank you, Mel!!!

They have another interesting law ‘over there’. The speed limit is different if it’s raining. At first it wasn’t raining; we even had the top down. Rather optimistically cos the clouds were black as night. Then it was drizzling. Ok, what do I do? Slow down? Or ask for a proper definition of rain? Then it got progressively harder until there was not much ambiguity about rain or not. It was fucking torrential. Ok, so how fast do you can? Can you go? And as only about 5% of the speed signs actually say “130 but 110 if il pleut’, can you assume that it only applies on those roads or sections where they sign that? I didn’t have a clue. Nor, apparently did many Frenchmen, as I dropped my speed to find myself being overtaken by Citroens doing 140, Renaults doing 145 and mopeds ridden by onion-wearing, beret toting, Breton-striped Frogs doing 155!!! Others were adhering rigidly to 110. So I ignored them and chased the mopeds.

We made it. Plenty of time. Rain or no rain.

Got back to Folkstone, even more rain. Buckets of it. Lovely ride up the M20 in the rain and spray, fab. But even that was heaven compared to… driving back through South London in endless fucking traffic. Ok, north London wasn’t masses better but at least it felt like ‘home’.

And here we are, where it all began.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx