Gasole

Gasole

It was an early-summer day when we left Lourmarin taking A6 upward toward Lyon.
We’d enjoyed the lavender and poppy laden quaint village of Lourmarin—made famous by Peter Mayle in A Year in Provence—for a couple of weeks, taking daily trips to surrounding hamlets and villages and returning each afternoon to enjoy the food and ambiance of our local village a short walk from our apartment.
While packing up, we reminisced about the trip already archived in our mind and on our blog. We were setting out for Dijon, north of the bustling city of Lyon, where we planned to spend four nights with our friends before dropping off our rented car in Paris where we were going to eventually wind up for yet another week.
A couple of weeks earlier we’d arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport, where we met friends who live in Paris. They took us to our hotel, conveniently located just outside Gare de Lyon. We met again for dinner, and then slept for a few hours before taking the fast train (TGV) from Paris to the car rental station in Aix en Provence—a point not far from Lourmarin.
Our rental agency provided us with a nice diesel Peugeot that proved to not only be economical to drive, but also quite comfortable—an excellent touring car. We explored the Vaucluse region of Provence for two weeks, requiring gas only once. The station clerk pointed to the appropriate pump at that time.
I should say here that I speak French roughly, but my husband doesn’t speak it at all. I’m the one who gets us by, albeit minimally, on our treks to France each year.
Just before ten in the morning we looked one last time at the beautiful gardens surrounding our rented apartment at Les Olivettes before heading out. We drove for quite a distance before it was time to get some gasoline. Anybody who has driven in France knows that there are many gas stations along the A6, so we knew we would not run dry.
Just to the south of Lyon, my husband stopped for gas, telling me he’d handle it. Speaking no French, he couldn’t figure out which pump to use. I told him to please go inside and ask the clerk. Instead, unbeknownst to me, he did what he thought to be the best thing: asked a man standing nearby.
“Is the green colored pump the diesel?” He asked in his if-I-speak-slowly-in-English-he’ll-understand-me tone.
The polite gentlemen (I learned later) gave a friendly nod and my husband felt he’d broken the language barrier. Pleased with himself, he lifted the hose and began filling the nearly empty tank with regular grade gasoline (I learned this later too when he told me what he thought the pump had written on it).
It was at this point that I asked him (my fault), “How did you know which pump to use?”
“Well, I know from the last time we got gas, that it was the green tank…and, well, I also asked a nice man and he nodded affirmatively.”
I felt a slight hitch in my stomach and silently pondered the question of what might occur if one were to put the wrong gas in a diesel car?
Less than 50 kilometers later we began to learn. The car began to sputter and jerk, sort of like it wasn’t firing on all cylinders, but only so slightly at first. We drove around Lyon, taking the by-pass, as I continued to silently worry with each jerk of the car. It was also nearing lunchtime and I’d packed a superb French lunch with the wonderful leftover sausages, cheese, diet coke, fresh French bread from our morning delivery at the apartment and some radishes. I suggested that we stop at a roadside stop—one with a picnic ground and a gas station so that my husband might ask a mechanic to look at the car. We decided to park in the picnic area to enjoy lunch and then my husband would walk back the 300 or so yards to the gas station to see if he could figure out the problem with the car.
We broke out the lunch and enjoyed a tailgate meal in the warm sunshine at the edge of the Côte d’Or wine country. Afterward, we packed everything up and decided to circle back around to the gas station.
All the cranking in the world wouldn’t start the car. It was not going to take us anywhere. We were literally in the middle of nowhere and with my rough French I lacked the confidence to explain exactly what might have happened to cause our breakdown.
My husband walked to the service station, but wasn’t successful in communicating, though he’d tried. Needing to work off my building angst, I said I was going to visit the ladies room, so I walked back to the gas station mumbling prayers as I walked.
When I came back out into the daylight and looked off in the distance, I panicked, as I didn’t see the car anywhere. As the car came screeching around a corner, I spied it just as the door flew open, with my husband shouting, “Hurry! Get in! I cranked the hell out of her, and she kicked.” I had to wonder if those mumbled prayers might have had something to do with it?
I quickly jumped in and we were off. The kilometers clicked off but the sputtering became more pronounced. We were heading into farm/wine country with no roadside stops or homes within visual range and the more the Peugeot sputtered, the more nervous I became.
To make things worse the sky had turned a threatening inky black—the kind of black I’ve seen in Kansas with the car radio blasting warnings to get off the road and seek refuge. Within minutes the sky opened up with buckets of water pouring out. Like Paris, when it rains in Lyon, it really rains—a virtual deluge and for a long while.
Now we were going to be stranded and drenched as if it wasn’t enough that we barely got by with the language. Being stranded would prove to be more difficult than ordering in a restaurant or purchasing Advil in the drug store. Although we thought it couldn’t be any worse, we were wrong. We entered into a highway construction zone with narrowed lanes and a missing shoulder—leaving us nowhere to pull off the highway when breakdown inevitably occurred. We were limping along in the slowest right lane at barely 30 miles per hour in the heavily traveled truck lane.
The worst occurred.
“Uh oh,” My husband said in a tone that alerted me unequivocally to danger.
“Oh no, it’s finished?” I tried to keep calm.
“Afraid so, honey.” His face paled.
I quickly jerked around to see what was coming behind us, as we were starting an assent up a steady incline on the highway. Trucks, lines of them were approaching and we’d be stopping in a very dangerous place in pouring rain in our small dark blue Peugeot.
With little power left, my husband let out a gasp as he spied an opening between construction barriers and, as if we were blessed, an emergency calling phone! He pulled the steering wheel as hard as he could and the car quit on the edge of the highway, just off the surface, next to a deep culvert.
We had no umbrella but quickly got out of the vehicle and pulled the emergency flag from the trunk (all cars have these emergency flags in France), and walked the 25 yards to the call phone.
We’ve have had a long love affair with France. The government runs well and with practicality. As it turned out, the emergency call station also had a video camera and much to our relief the operator was not only able to see us, but our car as well. The first thing she did was verified that we were okay and didn’t need police assistance. Imagine that! She also spoke good English. She assured us that we need not worry; someone would be out to rescue us within an hour. It was such a relief. We got back in the car and waited patiently.
Within the hour a Frenchman from a local village came by. He spoke no English but gave us the nod that told us the car was broken. He used sign language to let us know what he was going to do, e.g., trailer the car and carry us to the garage where he worked.
Because we did not know where we were, nor could we, with any sort of specificity, tell a taxi driver or anyone where we were (except somewhere on A6) or where we needed to go, our emotional state was filled with both dread and relief. Nonetheless, we climbed into the tow truck and sat wide-eyed as the driver drove and drove and drove. He took an exit off the highway, followed by a winding drive through small hamlets and villages, stopping at a Volvo dealer in the middle of a small village some distance from the highway where we’d broken down. The dealer’s clerk spoke enough English to tell us that the tow truck driver who dumped us and then left, had a contract with the State to provide service and that he was the nearest to our breakdown site. It was now approaching six o’clock on a rainy Saturday night and the dealer wanted to close up his shop and go home. Also, the local rental company was closed. We got only a recording in French—one we didn’t much understand—except the part about being closed until Monday! We really needed the refuge of this auto dealer at the moment since we hadn’t a clue about how to remove ourselves from the mess we were in.
We called our friends in Dijon. After explaining what had happened and enduring a long pause for laughter, we explained that we didn’t know where in France we were.
Our friend asked for the street address—something we could easily supply. He then plugged the information into his French GPS and voila our location identified. In our fearful moments, we’d passed our exit some 20 kilometers earlier (we could have actually limped into our friend’s driveway—but we try not to think about that). It would be another thirty minutes to get there in his 2CV, we told the polite dealer who made yet another telephone call to his wife. We’re not certain that she was very pleased, since he walked out into the garage to explain the situation further to her.
We removed our two Samsonite twirling suitcases and two twirling carry-ons from the Peugoet, rolling them into the dealer’s showroom to await our ride. Within 45 minutes our friend pulled in. At that point we couldn’t imagine getting all our luggage and us into the 2CV, but our friend exited the vehicle carrying a chilled bottle of champagne with four glasses and popped the cork, topped off the glasses and said, “Welcome to Dijon, my friends.”
He easily put the luggage into the tiny trunk, the edge of our day fading with each sip of good French champagne, and we were soon on our way back to Courternon, just outside of Dijon.
Our rental agency didn’t flinch. They located our vehicle and arranged for us to replace it with another in Dijon, near the Gare de Dijon,
Nothing felt better than to turn onto the street and into the driveway where our friend lived in Courternon. Some day we hope to make the trip again. We’re certain it must have been a beautiful drive, however, we were in no condition to enjoy it.
The one French word my husband now knows well is: gasole. A word he’s not likely to ever forget!