It has been a bad 48 hours for Team Madcap.

 As we write this we are stranded in a cheap hotel room in a small village called St Chely d’Apcher somewhere in the French mountains. Unfortunately I can’t say that we’re here for the altitude training.

Any sailor who has come through the youth squad system has been spoon fed the concept of only focusing on ‘controlling the controllables’.  A different way of saying the same thing is that anything you are in control of, it is your fault if things mess up.

Normally, when something goes wrong we can isolate the cause by something we failed to prepare for (that’s how we learn). But, on this rare occasion I think we can genuinely say that we’ve been handed some rotten luck.

In short, the Slug has let us down.

We think it is something to do with the fact that her clock was on 99,400 miles - and she is reluctant to get older (she thinks it’s all downhill after 100,000 miles).

Here’s an account of the last 48 hours -

• Everything goes swimmingly from Grafham down to Dover, and we cover 400+ miles in 12 hours (including the ferry trip). Well, almost swimmingly - at Dover the assistant pointed out that we (Jonny…cough) had booked the Calais-Dover ferry rather than the Dover-Calais ferry. But everything got srtoed pretty smoothly, a few extra beans out of pocket, but nothing that wouldn’t break the bank. Jonny won’t live that one down in a hurry.

n.b. quick translation: beans = ‘money’ in our lingo, it helps distance ourselves from the real meaning of spending more than you can afford. Jonny’s logic behind ‘beans’ is that money buys beans, and beans cost money, and we eat beans as fast as we spend money. I like to think some day we will find some of those magic beans like in Jack and the Beanstalk. Which grows and grows… but I digress.

• we get about 150 miles past Paris, fill up, and that’s where alarm bells start ringing. Putting her into gear is getting harder and harder, a sure sign of clutch problems. But we only change gear a couple of times an hour on the uber-efficient French tolls, so we just cross our fingers.
• Unfortunately, a few toll stations and roundabouts later, the clutch as good as dies on us. We stumble into a service station and prepare to call Green Flag.

This is where the problems begin…

• phone Green Flag. We give them the policy number for our European Breakdown Cover, and they have ‘issues’ finding the policy, saying that we are only covered for trailers and caravans on this particular policy - as we have neither a trailer nor a caravan, and as our docs quite clearly say Ford Transit, we try our hardest not to start shouting at them.
• Green Flag say to call the company Maidez who we booked the policy with according to their system. Maidez can’t match the policy either, and give us a number for the underwriters. We phone the underwriters, and they give us a number to call. No prizes for guessing who answers…. Green Flag! So we go full circle, spent 45 minutes getting nowhere, and Jonny is left with a phone bill that he’s not sure he’s going to be able to afford to pay at the end of the month (little did he know that those calls were only the tip of the iceberg).
• At this point the Green Flag representative (who we think is possibly the moodiest person in the world), also pointed out that even if they COULD find the policy, that as we were on a French motory, then by law they’re not allowed to come and recover us - apparently getting to a motorway service station and breaking down there is not convenient enough for them. She says we have to get local recovery to drive us from the motorway to a side-road. Is it just us? Or is the world going mad?She also says that if they can’t find the policy then we’ll have to foot the bill for the roadside recovery - I tell her that if they can’t find the policy then they’ll be footing the bill for the legal challenge we present to them.
• Team Madcap then re-groups, and disocver that we are just about able to change gears with a combination of the bit of clutch we had left and some strategic revving. So we form a Master Plan - we decide to stick their recovery service where the sun don’t shine, and try and get to Barcelona (for our ferry) without changing gear.Given our options it wasn’t such a rash plan - if the clutch got any worse we’d make sure we broke down on a non-motorway road. If we got to Palam, then we’d have over a month to get it fixed.
• The plan works better than expected - For 90 minutes we cruise in 5th gear without a glitch. But then we hit the hills… lots of them. Unable to change gear for fear of breaking the Slug once and for all, we stick in 3rd gear both up AND down the hill (with some very irrate lorry drivers in our wake). But somehow we survive, albeit very slowly, for the next 2 1/2 hours.
• No sooner had I asked Jonny ‘what are our chances of making Barcelona’ - to which his reply was about a 6 out of 10 - then we lost drive altogether, at the bottom of a very steep hill.

Bugger

We broke down at 11am, the ferry sails at 11pm. Roadside repair was our last chance of making it. Fat chance. They tow us to the nearest local garage, and charge us 130 eurobeans for the privilege.

n.b. during our ‘alone time’ at the side of the road, we work out that the muppets at Green Flag might have been looking at the wrong policy, as my Dad also has a policy with them (which, as it turns out, he booked with Maidez!). So despite have a different name and a different registration number and a different policy number altogether, this was evidently too much for the Green Flag computer system to cope with. The policy had been sitting there all along.

At the local repair garage, we spend the next 6 hours in reception mustering up all the French we knew, consisting of about 14 useful words between us (we found we tell them all about where we went on holiday last year, but useful conversations like getting things fixed is a different game entirely - stupid GCSE French curriculum).

Fortunately, Green Flag came to the rescue. Sorry, caught wishing there. Green Flag (GF from now on) were equally as useless when it came to sorting the job out…

The garage requires a Confirmation of Payment Guarantee from GF before they will do anything with the Slug. And it was a desperate situation - we were having to act as translators between GF and the garage, a big problem considerin we didn’t undertand a word they were saying. We find it a trifle confusing that GF have only one fluent French-speakin representative in their European claims departmnet, who wasn’t in the office when we called.

After 7 - yes 7 - more phone calls, we find out that the garage needs to send GF a fax with the recovery details before they will send the Payment Guarantee. We send this to them… 4 times. After 4 more phone calls to see if they receive this, they eventually tell us that they did indeed receive them, but that it needs to be faxed on the Garage’s letterhead so that they can save it on their system. Great, thanks for telling us that guys.

Only one problem…

The garage does not have letterhead paper (this is a very small garage in a very small town). So another batch of phone calls. We are going to miss our ferry because a bit of paper doesn’t have a silly tyre logo at the top of it.

Eventually we slam the phone down on GF and I get out my credit card to pay for the lot. We’ll sort out the claims back in the UK.

Only, the card doesn’t work… nor my other 2… nor Jonny’s. The garage says there is a problem with our cards (! - all five of them).

Having been on the road non-stop for 24 hours, you might understand that at this point we’re beginning to lose the will to live. AFter more pictionary/charades with the garage receptionist, we say we’ll come back tomorrow and pay cash for it, and they kindly drive us to the nearest hotel for the evening.

We go for a walk to de-stress. I tread in a big pile of dog poo. Jonny nearly wets himself with laughter, it was one of those moments where you either laugh or you cried. A perfect end to a perfect day.

It turns out that part for the Van doesn’t arrive until Wednesday afternoon, so we are stuck here for the next few days. No sailing, 1-bar of wireless internet if we hold our laptop out the window of our room (which is password-protected so useless anyway), and sweating at the 750 eurobeans repair bill waiting for us on Thursday.

It’s time time to go and beg the ferry company for a date change.

 We’ll let you know if we ever make it to Palma. The Slug needs some reassuring words, so if you have any then you can post them as a comment t othis blog post.

Max and Jonny

p.s. today has been like a major case of deja-vu, the exact same proplems happened last year during our US Cycling Trip

Today’s stats:

• number of phone calls to Green Flag: 15
• pence per minute for the calls: XX (censored for Jonny’s sake)
• Hour spent driving with 1 gear: 4
• The Slugs time of death: 25th Feb 2008 at 11:12am
• premature wrinkles gained from sleep deprivation and stress: 3
• chance of being stuck in St Chely d’Apcher forever and ever: 4/10
• miles until Slug’s 100k birthday: 342