On Monday, June 21st, I awoke and headed over to the garage first thing in the morning hoping to get the work on Betty underway. The mechanic Marc, the same guy that gave me the tow, came over to the vehicle with a battery jumper. It barely turned the girl over. He returned almost an hour later with a small diesel car....same problem. He claimed that there could be more problems as the battery jumper he first tried can fire up the tow truck that Betty had ridden in on. He told me to pull the battery out and they would charge it at the garage. The other mechanic there said it would take 4-5 hours, ugh...4-5 hours to kill and then they might figure out that she needs a new alternator. I resigned myself to the fact that I might be staying yet another night in Chateau Arnoux. I went for another walk around, checking out the streets behind where I was parked. I somehow made five hours disappear and returned to the garage. The battery was ready so I reinstalled it and voila, she fired up. I went back to the service station but Marc was out towing someone. Since he wasn’t the friendliest guy, and my friends from Canada should be in St. Andre Les Alpes, and I’d had enough of Chateau, I high tailed it out of town. Fittingly I passed by Ahmed in his purple bumpered truck and emphatically waved goodbye to him.
About an hour later, driving down some windy roads between mountains while following a river, I entered into St. Andre only to be greeted by some dark clouds sprinkling some rain. I went to Pierre’s hotel but he wasn’t around although he was in fact staying there. I checked out the campground but Torge and Jodi weren’t staying there. Oh well, I will. I knew this was the campground Pierre had talked about so perhaps the newly married couple had continued on to Nice as Torge had a geology course there for the week. I was able to hook Betty up to electricity and connect to the Internet...I felt reconnected with the world. I had a skype call with Nola and was able to catch her up on all of my vehicular fun.
The beautiful scenery on the drive:
Pierre stopped by the campsite just as I was starting to walk towards his hotel and we went out for a nice dinner and planned to meet in the morning to have breakfast, inquire at the local garage about Betty’s alternator issue and hopefully go flying!!!
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