Around The World – Le Mans, France
My goal today is to continue west across France and make a stop in Le Mans, the home of perhaps the most famous race and race track in the world.
My Le Mans Airbnb host Emma works until 7pm but I arrive on the train much earlier, so I’ll have to lug my suitcase around or find a place to put it. When I arrive, I find out at the Information desk that they don’t have any lockers available at the station, so it’s going to come with me for the day.
Google Maps lets me down here with a lack of bus and tram information. I get some advice to take the T1 tram south and then walk to the car museum next to the track. I follow the GPS as we go but I missed the optimal stop. I came to the end of the line and back up again, got off and an unhappy 30 minute walk dragging my rolling suitcase down the side of the road is not fun, folks!
I finally make it to the museum and I’m the only customer in the whole place. We are definitely in the doldrums of low season. I ask if I can put the suitcase and backpack somewhere since I don’t want to drag them through the museum but the girl at the desk says no, because of terrorism they can’t. Then when she entered that I was Canadian in the visitor database, she let me put my stuff in a closet! Victory over terrorism! If we can’t leave our stuff in a closet, the terrorists have won!
The museum is amazing, with a hallway of biographies and pictures of famous drivers, team owners and organizers, leading into the car area, covering the very earliest to the modern racer. I have seen some of these exact cars in action, like the Silk Cut Jaguar and Nissan GTP at Lime Rock race track back in Connecticut.
I decide I can’t do the rolling walk again, so the ticket girl calls a taxi for me. I ask the driver to take me to a restaurant somewhere in the center of town so I can eat then go to my Airbnb, but she says everything is closed. Ah yes, France, where you can’t eat anything before 7pm. We did manage to find one place and I ordered a cheese salad, with no mention of onions, and a glass of local red wine. The salad came out mixed with onions of course so I ate the big slabs of cheese and the fresh tomatoes around the edge.
I then walked about 10 minutes to the Airbnb. My host is Emma and she has a craft/instructional store in town where small classes of children to adults make things from paper, plastic, stone, metal and other materials. She gave me good information on how to get a little closer to the track tomorrow. It turns out the city and the track management don’t get along so there is no convenient public transport from town to the main track entrance. They don’t even run special bus shuttles during the race.
I found out that the town is known not just for the track, but for the Old Town, called Cité Plantagenêt, with a stone wall dating back to 300 AD and a striking cathedral built in the 11th century which has the oldest known piece of stained glass in the world.
I acquired the Le Mans movie with Steve McQueen so I could try to spot things around town and see how the track has changed in the last 40 years.
In the morning I Instant Booked a whole Airbnb cottage in Caen in Normandy near the D-Day beaches. I’ll spent 2 nights there and look into a bus tour of the sites, then it’s down to Bordeaux for some wine tasting, then over into Spain.
I walked into town with Emma on her way to her workshop. I got on the tram and then changed to the #3 bus that took me almost all the way to the track.
I paid 3.50 euros for my ticket to find that I was the only spectator in the whole track. When I got there, there were some club cars going around, followed by a driving experience company with four Pescarolo 2-seat racing cars and 3 road Porsche 911s. My ticket got me everywhere on the track except in the paddock area since cars were on the track. As I approached the interior grandstands, I blended in with the folks arriving for the driving experience and climbed my way to the top row which gives an amazing view of the front straight, but did little for my fear of deceleration trauma.
From there I climbed down and walked counter-clockwise around the circuit, through tunnels and across the famous Dunlop bridge. At the back corner I saw a sign and an arrow marked “Tram”. This was strange that nobody knew about it but I thought it might get me back to town without the long walk. At the end of the day I was at the front gate again and I asked the security guard if the back gate to the tram was open. He clearly understood me and said yes, it’s open. So I walked back across the track, through the tunnels and out to the back gate, which of course had a 10 foot high metal grille which was chained and padlocked closed and nobody in sight. I stood there and shook the gate and screamed at the top of my lungs. Bastard! I could see the tram station just on the other side, which was really for the closeby MM Arena. I didn’t fancy a long walk back to the front gate then another 30 minute walk to the bus stop, so I hiked up my pants and climbed over the gate. Even through I was breaking out and not in, I felt like a bad-ass. If anybody objected, I would get them to call the front gate and confirm that he told me the gate was open. And also, go fuck yourself. Yeah, I went there.
Reveling in the very-infrequent rush of testosterone, I took the tram back to the city center then walked to the Old City. It’s a Roman-era, walled area, built over the course of the centuries. The Platagenêt royal family was based here before they married in and became the Kings of England, leading to the Magna Carta and The War Of The Roses and were finally succeeded by the Tudors of Henry the 8th fame. The pictures don’t do justice to the ancient feeling you get walking around. I stopped into Emma’s shop to see it, she was busy with children in a class and several other customers, good to see her business flourishing.
I walked back up to the center of town and had a couple of hot chocolates in a packed coffee house, then walked into the Christmas Market, every town I’m in seems to have a Christmas Market. This one had a small skating ring and a large ferris wheel. I had a waffle with Nutella and took the tram back to Emma’s place.
Back at the Airbnb I watched the Le Mans movie. Terrible 70’s filmmaking, but I recognized many of the sites around the town like the cathedral right at the start of the film and many of the aspects of the track. There’s even a plucky little white Porsche 914 like mine that keeps showing up in the movie.
Le Mans is definitely worth a stop, if you’re a fan of racing or 2000 year old buildings or both. Next stop, D-Day.
