CHAPTER 4 A Holiday with Tracy

In my early twenties I had moved to live in Swindon, Wiltshire. I had a girlfriend Tracy. We had previously shared one holiday in Torquay, Devon, with Tracy’s parents, her sister Lili and Lili's boyfriend Teddy. Tracy was a pretty petite redhead, who closely resembled the girl in the art nouveau painting the "Moon" by Alphonse Mucha. Lili was also a good looker, but taller than Tracy and blond. Teddy looked like an Elvis impersonator with bad teeth.

Now we had decided to go a bit further a-field. This time without Tracy’s parents to accompany us. It was decided we should head down to the South of France and then assuming the driver, me, still had any energy left, cut across Italy to Rimini on the Italian East coast. Tracy, Lili and Teddy had some years before been to Rhodes, a Greek Island and liked lively Mediterranean resorts.

So in mid July, we set out from Swindon in my metallic blue, two litre, MK 3 Ford Cortina, which I had brought at a bargain second hand price from a car auction. Although the car had quite a high mileage, it had so far proved to be reliable.

After arriving in Calais we headed South, planning to take a similar route to my earlier trips with my parents. A few map reading errors, meant that while the direction we took was more or less southward, we strayed a bit from the original route.

Our first overnight stop was at a small town called Joinville on the river Marne. We found a small hotel, the Lion d’Or which had it’s own restaurant. My French was by now very rusty and it took a while to explain the sleeping arrangements we required. These were met with looks of disbelief.

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