The third and final European trip in the group stage saw a new place to visit in Bordeaux.  I’d booked everything so far before the trip that I had to give myself a reminder course in all the things I’d researched at the time of the draw.  Gatwick flights had looked expensive so I was booked on Easyjet out of Luton and then coming back with Ryanair to Stansted, but from Bergerac.  Bergerac had looked quite close on the map but in looking up the train times it was over an hour away and the service wasn’t very regular.  I was also going for four nights on my own, a bit of a test in some ways.  It wasn’t too early a start from Luton and I was already checked in for both out and return flights before I left home.  But early morning travel always needs care as everything may not be in place as you expect.  So I did bus and tube to the newly renamed St Pancras International, arriving to find all the trains to Luton were running late.  As it turned out I had plenty of time and had the usual hanging around at the airport, Luton being a particularly dull airport to be in too long.  I spent another flight working my way through the European Football Yearbook for last season. 

At the French end everything was clearly marked and I found the relevant bus stop for the trip into the city and even worked out where to ask to be dropped so I was quite near the hotel.  I was staying in an Etap hotel, part of the Accor chain.  I’d stayed in a brand new one in Cardiff for the last cup win there.  This one was older and was literally just the side part of the Ibis hotel run by the same chain.  It was a bit like going in the side entrance but I wasn’t planning on spending a lot of time there anyway.  In fact I was out to explore the city in a matter of minutes.  I decided to see how far the ground was as this was part of the reason I’d chosen the location.  It turned out to be quite easy to walk to though it looked pretty shabby from the outside especially in the gloomy weather conditions.  I found the tram stop and negotiated a ticket machine that claimed it had an English option which disappeared a couple of menus in, but I got a ticket that would last the day for a cheap price.  So I took a trip through the city centre down to the river.

The Garonne as a river deserves special mention for anyone visiting Bordeaux.  Compared with most city centre rivers it is very wide and there are very few bridges.  In the city centre there are only two road bridges, a dull new one and a pretty impressive old one that was quite a feat of engineering when it was constructed.  But first time by the river I didn’t hang around, as the weather wasn’t very welcoming.  I went down to the railway station to investigate my trip later in the week and just made it before it started bucketing down with rain.  The Friday trip wasn’t going to be too bad though I was disappointed to find that there were no other options to that I’d found on the Internet.  I had to hang around a bit to wait for a break in the rain so just watched the general bustle of a busy station before deciding another tram trip was enough to avoid the rain.  I asked in the tourist information about a couple of things including the weather, which didn’t sound great.

My Internet research had turned up a couple of cinemas that showed subtitled rather than dubbed films so I looked up the wonderfully named Utopia.  This cinema is in a converted church so you get the rather bizarre experience of watching a film overlooked by a religious statue.  The new Clint Eastwood film, ‘Changeling’ was out ahead of London so I went to see that managing to tune out the French subtitles.  Then being time to eat I decided to check out a pizza place recommended in my city guide.  The only difficulty here was as I was tired and had recently been in Rome I couldn’t work out whether I should be saying please and thank you in French or Italian!  The food was good and I suspect I got quicker service being on my own.  I went for a walk afterwards as it had finally stopped raining before retiring for the night.

The Tuesday dawned without a cloud in the sky so the promised colder brighter weather had arrived a day early.  So ideal for my planned day of proper exploring of a city listed as a world heritage site as a whole rather than for a specific thing.  I don’t know how many miles I walked but it was a fair few.  To me the most striking thing was the uniformity of height for the majority of buildings, which is unusual in a modern city.  Thankfully it wasn’t spoilt in the centre by any ugly modern tower blocks.  There is a very long pedestrian shopping street that I kept crossing at different points before realising it was all the same street.  After locating most of the well known sights on a whim I crossed the river and explored the less fashionable right bank which gave a much better idea of how a few older buildings, mainly churches, dominate the skyline.  With the lack of bridges this did mean I had to try and do a circuit, as I would have to cross where I’d first come over the river, but at least the way the river bends meant this wasn’t too difficult.  I then looped round a few remaining sights like the Grosse Cloche, even making a brief visit back to the hotel, before going for a wander up the other bank right down by the waterfront.  This turned into a bit more of a trek than originally planned as first I wanted to see what they’d done with the old waterfront (all modern shops and bars), then the marina (hardly any boats) and finally the bridge over the river that looks like the Humber bridge.  By the time I got that far my plan to just walk and not use public transport was out the window as it was a long walk back with no real alternative route.  Luckily the tram now goes out that far so I got a day ticket and hopped on one for the journey back.  With the day ticket this also meant I could hop on and off to look at a couple of sights I’d missed.

The evening was similar to the one before as I went back to the Utopia to see the new Woody Allen film I’d missed in Rome.  Called ‘Vicky Christina Barcelona’ it is set there so I saw a lot of familiar sights.  Not top rate Woody but a vast improvement on his previous film plus it isn’t out here until February!  I did get slightly lost when the Spanish characters argued in their own language with only French subtitles, though one of them kept saying, “Speak English!”  They also managed to go to the fairground right up on the highest hill, which has never been open when I’ve been there due to the time of year.  I then had a look at a couple of restaurants before picking one of the recommended ones in my guidebook.  Between us the proprietor and I overcame language barriers and I had an excellent meal even if I couldn’t tell you exactly what everything was.  I’d now found two recommended restaurants in succession that lived up to their write-ups!

Match day dawned as another cloud free morning and I went to explore a few sights slightly outside the main centre.  As I was walking back I started to see the first of the Chelsea day-trippers and got a message from Clive that he’d arrived.  We met outside the cathedral and decided to go up the Tour Pey-Berland for the view.  This isn’t the tallest tower in the city but is the tallest still open so late in the year.  The climb was hard work especially after my long walk the day before.  The staircase was narrow and spiralled up in a dizzying fashion and I even managed to bang my heads as I exited, these old French types must have been short.  The view was worth it as you could see the entire city stretched out on both sides of the river.  A few other fans had braved the climb too and when we got to the bottom the woman was waiting to lock up for lunch.  This is one thing in Europe that still exists outside the biggest cities, which cater for tourists more, the long European lunch where the majority of things shut.  It can take some getting used to.  However the stalls were open in the autumn market including those doing food and we managed to blunder our way through ordering a basic lunch without the benefit of any shared language.  Clive was also benefiting from my local knowledge now so he got to see things without having to worry about the boring bits.  We also started bumping into people including Vice Chairman Roy who had somehow missed Bordeaux on his 1998 World Cup tour.  First choice for an early evening meal would have been back to the pizza place but it didn’t open until 7 and we didn’t want to be rushing.  So we decided to go over the river as I’d noticed some places in the old railway station that is now mainly a multiplex cinema.  The first one looked closed so we went in something with the not very promising name of The Central Pub.  But for a beer and a pizza it was pretty good and it wasn’t crowded and was certainly too much off the beaten track for any other Chelsea fans to find it.  Only embarrassing thing was I somehow managed to drop my beer and break the glass as I helpfully moved things out of the way to fit the large pizzas on the table.  But, as I found everywhere on this trip, the reaction was calm and polite and I even got a free replacement beer.

We walked off our meal on the trip to the ground with the surprise of bumping into a very drunk northern friend on the way.  We weren’t surprised to see him but normally he is sober, this time he couldn’t remember where he was staying and couldn’t get his mobile back together after dropping it; a sorry state of affairs.  We got into the ground and strangely for a European away game used the seats allocated to us but then they were good seats and we were next to some fellow regulars including the drunken one!  Like most of our recent European trips the game was the let down of the trip as we struggled to impose ourselves and drew after taking an ill deserved lead.  I walked back into town with a few friends who’d located a bar they knew would be open late, necessary as we needed to drown our sorrows.  They had had a very close shave in catching their flight that morning after getting stuck in traffic.  We had a good old chat and did manage to avoid dwelling on the game before it reached closing time and we went back to our respective hotels.

Thursday was cloudier but still dry and I mixed revisiting sights and finding a few new ones.  I went down to the station and sorted out my ticket for the next day concluding that it would have to be an early start.  There were signs on all the tram stops about something happening on the Friday but I couldn’t quite translate it all and when I asked in the tourist information they said trams started early enough for me to make a train at 8 in the morning.  By now the number of Chelsea fans was dwindling though it had become apparent that a lot had come the whole way by train via the Channel tunnel and Paris.  It was back to the Utopia again deciding to watch ‘Rear Window’ again as it was a long time since I’d seen it.  It still holds up pretty well.  I went for a more basic meal this night in a restaurant that was pretty busy with locals.  Not up to the other meals but still good.  I took a final wander around the city including down by the riverside before heading back for a slightly earlier night.

The next morning it was up and out early without any complicated checking out to resolve.  I had enough time to walk and it turned out I needed to as there wasn’t a tram to be seen anywhere.  The signs were still on all the boards and as far as I could tell I think they were on strike along with most of the buses.  It was a bit further to the station than I’d thought probably because the maps in my guidebook were not all to the same scale but I made it with a few minutes to spare.  The train had a few people on it and left on time setting off into a very misty French countryside.  Most people got off at Libourne and the train then went down to one track and pottered along through the mist and a few small towns where it stopped before getting to Bergerac.  I had printed off a city centre map from the Internet and was pretty sure I knew how to get to the centre.  But the one thing that struck me was the cold as it was barely above freezing.  I found the main square and a tourist information place that was nice and warm inside.  The young lady spoke the best English I’ve ever heard in France and provided me with an official map and a guide to walking through the old town centre.  First I wandered down to the Dordogne where the sun was struggling and failing to break through the mist that floated above the river.  There were not a lot of people about and it wasn’t thronged with tourists as I followed the route round the narrow streets of the old town.  They had a very dodgy statue of Cyrano himself in one square but no sign of Mr Le Saux or that detective bloke from Jersey.

I took refuge in a café to try and get some feeling back into my frozen extremities, perching myself right next to the radiator.  I then took a circuitous route round the rest of the centre before crossing the river to see what was on the other side.  I walked up the main road a bit to see if there was any indication of where the airport was as it was only supposed to be a couple of kilometres.  I just got barked at by a couple of dogs before the path ended abruptly.  I retraced my steps as far as the more modern bridge over the river and then explored to see if the floodlights I could see were for the local team.  They were but unfortunately for rugby not football.  So I went back to the tourist office just beating them shutting for lunch.  They confirmed a taxi was the only way to the airport and very helpfully said if I came back when I wanted one they’d call it for me.  I then went to find lunch picking a restaurant in the old town, which wasn’t too full.  The meal was, no surprise really, excellent and I finally felt warmed up too.  They are so polite in this part of France that the other customers wished me good day as they left after their meal!  My third trip back to the tourist office produced a taxi and whilst I was waiting I was consulted about the English translation for a local Internet café flyer!  I was able to confirm that what was obviously a literal translation from the French didn’t sound right in English and came up with some better wording before the taxi arrived.  It didn’t take long to get to the airport and the fare was exactly what I’d been told it would be.  Bergerac airport is tiny and unfinished at the moment with not many places to sit.  Luckily by checking in online I went through the security first to the slightly more salubrious lounge.  I only saw two planes whilst there the Ryanair flight back to Stansted and a single seater from the local flying club who I guess still use it more than anyone else.  But at least it meant it was pleasantly quiet so I could sit and read as I waited.  Also means you are in no doubt where you should be, one gate one plane so one departure point.  So after a long week I returned home safely and good old England hadn’t changed as the first thing that happened was the Stansted Express was stopped at Bishops Stortford and we were all kicked off, with no explanation, in the rain to await another train.

Patrick MHU will return in “The Italian Job”.