Two Days To Visit IKEA !

With excitement we learned for a friend that Ikea had opened in Montpellier, we decided to take a trip there and purchase a few things for our new abode.

As always the trip took much longer than expected and we found ourselves with a car full of furniture and it had now become very dark and cold. We set off for Cazilhac and encountered upon a very slow car on the road, we both looked at each other and said typical, Den decided to pass it while he had the opportunity, we drove past at a reasonable rate only to be met by another very slow moving car on the roundabout. As we followed it around the roundabout we joined the end of a very long traffic jam. We sat in it for about 40 mins and could not make out what the problem was, we decided to turn around as a lot of other cars had done. As we turned the car around Den discovered what the problem was the road was a sheet of black ice. We decided it was too dangerous to try to make our way back on a minor road. We turned the car around again and joined the queue.

I glanced up and looked in my mirror at the car behind and someone was getting out of it and approaching our car, I said to Den “the man behind is coming over to talk to us. Fat chance if he wants to do it in French” as you can gather by that statement our French still leaves a lot to be desired. As he got closer amazingly enough it was our friend Graham returning from England after a Christmas visit with his family. He was on his way back from Montpellier Airport with his new French girlfriend and her 8 year old daughter.

We sat in the queue for a further hour and discovered that there had been a 30 car pile up and the queue was 15 KM long. The Gendarmerie came along and turned everyone around and said the road was closed. Luckily we had Graham and his girlfriend with us to translate. She quickly got on the phone to her friends and got them to hunt down a hotel for us, the first was full but the second which luckily was not too far away. We booked in and went to our rooms, we had booked adjoining rooms, we only had the clothes we stood up in, Graham and Eve were a little better off they had a Christmas pudding (which Eve called Pudding Christmas) and a tin of Heinz beans they had bought back from England. That is a trip to Ikea we will never forget.