Something of the track demons remained

on the drive to Luxembourg, and I leadfooted it along the first stretch of the autobahn. Turns out the Saab is good for 120 mph and a further traumatised Ashley, thanks to the heedless lemming drivers darting into the fast lane as we barrelled along with only '70s brake technology to retard our progress.

We reached Luxembourg intact and had a coffee in the sun while waiting for Luc and Marie to turn up. It's very old Europe: castles, vertiginous defensive walls and narrow crooked houses set in a picturesque valley. We walked around the old town for a while, had a couple of drinks by the meandering river and almost visibly relaxed. Luxembourg felt almost like home after the sundry mad dashes from point to point so far in the journey.

Luc and Marie had booked a table in a nifty little restaurant. We gorged ourselves on tartiflette (I'd forgotten to quite what a degree cooking in continental Europe hinges around cheese and ham! Not a bad thing per se, of course) and some tasty Breton cider, then waddled to a cocktail bar guarded by a politely zealous maitre'd:

M'd: "Your jacket, sir."
Jez: "No, I'm fine thanks."
M'd: "Your jacket, sir."

A couple of excellent White Russians reminded me why I used to drink them quite literally ad nauseum, although at the price they charged they might as well have been Blow Jobs. Lulled by the near-darkness, the conversation dried up along with our cash and we called it a relatively early night. Marie's sister kindly put us up at their house, and the drive to Paris looked a hell of a lot more reasonable after the whole genteel Luxembourgish interlude.

The trip to Paris went mostly without a hitch, and eventually we found ourselves on the Périphérique and heading in roughly the right direction. Miraculously, given our usual ability to blindly avoid the correct motorway exit at every turn, we escaped the motorised hell intact (every single van I saw on the Périphérique was a mess of dents and scratches, and at least one driver was composing a text message as he drove) and after only a couple of trips along Boulevard Clignancourt, found the hostel. Doubly miraculously, a parking garage presented itself a couple of blocks away. We parked up, unloaded, checked in and headed into the city centre to meet up with Jez' nominated and four-day-late co-driver Sally.

[Apologies for the ludicrous amount of time I'm taking to get this trip down; I've managed to be utterly lazy and tremendously busy in equal measures over the last week...]