Highlander went to France

[highlander]

I was in the south of France for a few days last week, doing a network upgrade job.

Flew Aberdeen -> Paris CDG, Paris CDG -> Biarritz, then got a hire car for the 50 minute drive over to Sailes-de-Bearns, where my hotel was. The base was within a 10 minute drive from there.

The hire car was a Peugeot 2008 PureTech, which is officially a cross-over type car, but is basically a slightly taller Peugeot 208 with roof bars. It was powered by a 1.2 litre 3-cylinder turbocharged 108 HP engine. I was actually really impressed! 108 HP and 151 ft/lbs torque meant it accelerated pretty well, and the 3-cyl engine gave a surprisingly nice snarling noise under hard acceleration. The interior was quiet, comfortable and well-laid-out (other than everything being on the wrong side of the car, but that was OK because I was on the wrong side of the road, too, being as I was in France). Seemed OK on petrol, which is a bonus. Rear parking sensors worked well.

The integrated GPS was a bit pants, but did manage to get me from A-to-B, even if it meant occasionally passing through point C and/or point D along the way. The boot is remarkably small, which is an unfortunate lacking in a car of this style, but I didn't have that much stuff with me on this trip.

I managed to cram serious amounts of work into two days. Replaced a whole bunch of crappy NetGear / D-Link unmanaged switch equipment for some decently-specced Cisco Catalyst stuff and performed a survey of the wiring on the site to see what type of infrastructure cabling was installed, how many ports they needed in each area vs. how many ports they had, took plenty of photos, etc. There was also the beginnings of an IP subnet migration, which for a site of that size can be a serious undertaking, especially when so many devices are statically assigned, and there are no records detailing which address has been assigned to which device.

The last day comprised of travelling to Paris in the morning, then spending 8 hours in the airport, before leaving for home again in the evening. CDG is a terrible airport. Terminal 2E contains no actual restaurants - they have a cafe downstairs where they will make up a fresh sandwich for you, and upstairs, there's a sort of cafe where you can buy a pre-packed sandwich, or a microwaveable meal - which they then allow you to microwave in one of their two self-service microwave ovens. And here's me thinking that France was supposed to be a bastion of world cuisine. Not even a sodding McDonalds. I ended up having a horrible pre-pack sandwich at lunch and another one just before my flight. I got a seat with a power socket next to it, and got some work done on my laptop via the airport WiFi (despite it being designed to kick you off and make you sign in again every 90 minutes).

At least the airport signage was better this time around. Last time I passed through CDG, around 5 years ago, I nearly missed my connecting flight back to ABZ because there was no signage telling me where to go to get it. I wasn't even meant to be passing through CDG; my flight from Warsaw to Copenhagen had been cancelled due to fog, after having been delayed 2 days due to a LOT Airlines aircraft belly-landing at Warsaw Airport...

[Doggy]

Sounds like a slightly less traumatic trip than last time, shame you had to swap flights at CDG, but I guess there's not a huge choice from Biarritz.
Reading between the lines, you'll be back again sometime soon.
Had a holiday just outside Biarritz in 2007, drove there in Xsara HDi 90 estate - 4 of us + 2 dogs. (That journey is what made me get my first 406). Nice part of the world though.
Interesting reading about the 3-cyl Pug. Maybe these engines aren't the ticking time bombs my prejudices paint them as.

You could have got a lift back with my bro, he's just back from the Midi-Pyrenees via his recently acquired country seat in the Creuse.
(So we had our annual wild boar feast yesterday).

[Welly]

Sounds like a busy couple of days, you could'a done with a full week there surely?