Explore europe in a campervan

Our van seems to be having rather a run of bad luck.  Yesterday a German car drove into it in the car park, breaking the bumper and the indicator.  The side panel is also slightly pushed in.  He must have reversed into it pretty hard, because Steele heard the bang from his van a hundred metres away.

Look what he did!

We had only just headed up onto the mountain, so it was very fortunate that Steele and Julie were nearby and able to make sure the driver left all his details.  To be fair, he was already on the phone to the police when Steele got to the scene.  Also the Municipal Police happened to be on one of their regular tours of the car park at the time and also summoned the Gendarmes.  Steele headed up the mountain to try to find us, which he luckily did after trying two pistes.

The damage isn’t fatal and, fortunately, the van is still driveable - as I didn’t fancy spending yet another night sleeping in a garage yard.  The driver left all his details, although he’d left by the time we got back.

As I mentioned briefly earlier in the week, the alternator has been replaced - a a price, but that’s always the way with vehicles isn’t it.  What I didn’t mention was that the garage managed to break the rear light cluster.  I pointed it out the first night we went back to the garage and, not being fluent, I THOUGHT he said - Yes of course we’ll replace that.  It turned out he actually intended to glue it back together!  Although I’m pretty mad I jsut couldn’t face trying to have an altercation in French and then having to leave the van there even longer to get the light replaced.  Suffice to say I would NOT accept that in the UK and I do NOT recommend S.A.R.L. Garage Thiollay in Montriond.

On Wednesday we drove to Lake Geneva - or Lac Leman as it’s called here - to fill up the LPG gas bottles and give the engine battery a really good run.  The lake is beautiful - huge and so still.  Unfortunately we forgot to take any photographs as the conditions weren’t quite as stunning as last time so here’s a picture from last year!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Diary, Campervan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.