Bonjour mes amis! I'm back.

3,400 miles across France, Germany, Switzerland and Italia at quite
some speed...

...though not quite as fast as last year's 150MPH, due to a] being done for
speeding by Jolly Jaques le Gendarme in January and b]  J.C's tales of
general aggressive prosecution for speeding these days. Having said that,
I didn't see a single speed trap the whole time (and hopefully they didn't
see
me either!).

Also managed to get into Switzerland without hassle for the
first time ever - the trick appears to be to buy a motorway permit before
crossing the border - the presense of the brightly coloured sticker on
the windscreen seems to re-assure the police somewhat. Anyhow,
for whatever reason,  they overlooked last years' embarassing little meeting
that I had with a Gatso in one of their tunnels, which was a relief.

I did (of course) get stopped, but only at the chunnel entrance on the way
back.

As we approached the customs post, I noticed a french soldier
(complete with sub machine gun) gesture to a flic (french cop) and point at
us. Sure enough, Jolly Jaques raises his hand and waves at us to pull over.
He then began a brief scan of the engine compartment and looked
rather uninterestedly at my papers. I noticed that his 'security check'
seemed
somewhat lacking in depth and when I asked him why he had stopped us
and what he was looking for   (all in my best and most friendly French, of
course) he nodded at his chum the soldier who, unnoticed by me,
had wandered round to the other side of the 308, lowered his 'piece' and
was busy taking pictures of the car (and of Gretchen* - cheeky sod).

Anyhooooooooooo... pictures will surely follow as soon as I get round
to downloading them from the camera.

Pip-pip!

MC-GT-PD
*and don't  the girls love a man in uniform? I was lucky she didn't run off
with a member of the Carabiniere in Italy - especially one with a Land
Rover. I think it's the red stripes on the trousers that do it :-(