Three journeys without satnav
Like believing what the newspapers say, travel without GPS makes for a life that's more "interesting"
The tunnel to oblivion
I wasn’t sure. Should I or shouldn’t I? I took a gamble. After all, people win from gambling, don’t they? Don’t they? Too late. “Here we go.” I plunged into darkness.
A mile. Another mile. It seemed like a dozen miles, and then, eventually, sodium streetlight could be seen ahead and I burst out into it, like a new-born babe freed from its placenta, into the brightly lit sterility of a theatre. At once I looked about me. Where was I?
A street corner, a street corner, my horse for a street corner in this god-damned kingdom! I found one. Stopped and peered. Above, a tree. Its branches, thickly obscuring the upward view to the object of my desire. Behind me a honk. “You need to move, y’know. It is a street, and all.” “Yes, but which flippin’ street is it?”
I disembarked from my conveyance and skirted the obscurity of the tree. There, positioned high on the corner stones of the building, was a street sign, announcing the name of a street.
In two languages.
Together with the logos of the local authority and the Greater Brussels Council.
Plus some decorative lining, vaguely art nouveau, I think. Redolent.
Plus an advert for a local business.
Perchance the numbers of the street for the side on which the sign is located. Surprised there was even any space to cram the name of the thoroughfare onto this already diminutive support.
Black printed on reflective white or
white printed on reflective – I suppose so – blue. Dark blue.
Small. Behind a tree. And, on that crossing, the only one.
“Use your GPS!”
“It’s 1992, GPS hasn’t been invented yet!”
“Use Google streetview.”
“I don’t even have the Internet yet, how can I use streetview?”
“Where do you need to go to?”
I point on my printed map and show him.
It’s a procedure I still follow. Because it brings me into contact with people. Whether they like it or not.
A date with no time
It takes about 40 minutes on average to have casual sex. Well, to start to have casual sex. Casual sex isn’t that casual, in fact. It’s extremely nerve-wracking. Because 40 minutes: that’s the time it takes to get to the starting point. How long the sex actually takes can vary. From several minutes to several days. The main thing at the time of arrangement is the starting point and getting to it.
I always thought that Ninove was where Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But that was Nineveh, although the great wickedness that was planned for Ninove was probably not far off that which had come to God’s notice in Nineveh. Anyhow, Ninove was to be the starting point of some casual sex this night and so its starting point needed to be achieved. It was winter.
Images: if, like me, you eschew GPS, then you may wish to note that Ninove (left) is in Flanders, and Nineveh (right) is more in the general direction of … Iraq.
The Ninove exit is easy enough to find, being marked along the route that leads from Kazakhstan to France; once off the main road, it was simply a question of circumnavigating the town until just before the viaduct that stretched across the railway, turning right and following my nose to number whatever it was. All up here, committed to indelible memory.
It’s the same exit as for Denderleeuw, oddly enough, where a friend of mine used to live before he got crushed in an industrial machine that he was repairing. A trainee switched the machine on by mistake. And, in a few seconds, Walter was dead, screwdriver still in his hand. Except, the Denderleeuw exit is impossible to find, from either direction, which I tried one day, along with Geert. The sign for Denderleeuw is obscured, in both directions of the motorway, by trees. Trust me, I know. Nonetheless, visible is the bit, which is low enough down, that says “Ninove”.
It’s the N45 that leads to Ninove. Well, it does and it doesn’t. For reasons best known to the provincial highways authority, the N45 gets to within an ace of Ninove and becomes the N28, just like that, without passing through anywhere or crossing a crossroads. Just, “poof”, N45 becomes N28. Whatever, they usually don’t even use the road numbers on signage. Makes you wonder why they even have them.
I had to turn right at the N8 and then exit before the bridge over the railway. I once had instructions how to find a hotel on the River Mosel, and I was to take the exit before the bridge over the Mosel, leading to Cochem. The problem with such directions is that, as one descends the steep incline towards the river, through the mottled shadows of the trees either side of the road, it is only as one emerges onto the flippin’ bridge that one realises, from the helpful sign at the side of the motorway, that you are indeed already over the River Mosel and that the exit a mile back is the one you should have taken. Thus it was this evening. Because railways, unlike, by contrast, some roads, are not actually lit at night. So, you’d not know that you’d just crossed a bridge over a railway. That black expanse, like. I didn’t think of that.
I don’t like to incur policemen’s wrath, so I don’t phone while driving. I decided to stop and call my tryst assignation, only to discover six messages, which varied in intensity from “Are you still coming?” to a tone that suggested we were already married; well, use your imagination.
I messaged back.
“Outskirts of Ninove, got misled by an unlit railway.”
“You can get a GPS for 50 euros.”
Oh dear, was I holding up the festivities? With my inadequate navigation down roads I’ve never been on in my life before? How remiss of me not to have invested the said sum in a device to whisk me to the gentleman’s foyer all the swifter. I replied.
“You can get stuffed. I could be standing on your doorstep right now, and I wouldn’t deign to come in.”
The rule for casual sex is: if you can’t be there in 15 minutes, don’t even bother trying. It was a quicker road back. I knew the way.
Lost in France
The D710 will probably not be all too familiar to the reader, nor indeed the D660, although the more worldly wise of you may recognise these as routes départementales in France. They are roads you would take if you wanted to cross country through the département of Lot-et-Garonne, from Fumel to Villefranche du Périgord, which is charming at this time of year. Fumel sits on the River Lot, which, contrary to the French word for “batch”, is pronounced more akin to English’s “beaucoup”. Fumel was sacked by Rodrigo de Villandrando, the scoundrel: he was a mercenary from Spain and the 1438 equivalent of Yevgeny Prigozhin, being dubbed the “Pillager Emperor”. But, if it hadn’t been for him, not a lot of people might ever have heard a lot about Fumel on the Lot.
It’s one of a few homes to my brother, who runs gîtes there (book yourself an idyllic getaway here: https://www.booking.com/hotel/fr/chez-louis-gites-fumel.en-gb.html; I won’t say it’s off the beaten track, but when night falls you can hear a pin drop for a mile, and bring your telescope for close-ups of Cassiopeia.) I stayed a day or two a couple of years back, driving up from a friend’s place in Escatalens over the balmy French countryside around Touffailles. No hurry, so the satnav was set for countryside travel.
The day of my departure was extremely early, as home was a distant destination and I needed to get a head start into the day. At just gone midnight.
Now, if you ever travel the D710 or the D660, you will readily agree they pass through some delightful little villages. And they wynd their way over some surprising hairpin bends (the “Jeez, what the …!” category) and steep climbs (I run a 4x4, so it’s always gratifying when the incline ratio drops to single figures), so that travelling by night, as I was doing, is recommended, assuming other motorists use their headlights. What is surprising about roads like the D710 and the D660 is that they have numbers at all. Because, for the most part, they don’t even have white lines. If you start out thinking they’re narrow, then they simply get narrower. And then they get narrower still, always with the road signs heralding this wonderfully numbered road. Or farm track, in places, to be fair.
What I couldn’t quite fathom is why my route was taking me over every single-track road in the county: after all, even with an early start, at this rate it would take a week to get home.
And then, it dawned on me. The road up from Escatalens had been chosen sans péage: no tolls. No need to pay tolls when you have all day to get where you’re going. The direct routing was now taking me home by … the direct route. Which would have been fine if I’d been in an aircraft instead of a car.
There is a cathartic flush of relief, as a motorist in the black dark in unfamiliar territory and nought but long “D” numbers to guide you aside from the stars in heaven above, when the road at once starts to get wider again.
If aliens landed tomorrow, would they assess the extent of our civilisation from the width of our roads? What else would they assess it by? Farmstead vacations?
Image: Chez Louis Gîtes, Fumel.