Having thoroughly enjoyed last year’s TSSC trip to Spa we decided that for 2016 we’d ‘double up’ and join in with the Club’s planned trips to both Laon and Le Mans.  As we once again planned to camp it was an easy decision to take the Stag, which has enough room to squeeze in essentials such as camp-beds, extra blankets and a comprehensive toolkit.The attractive provincial French city of Laon sits on one of Picardie’s rocky outcrops just to the north west of Reims, and as the drive from Calais passes through the Somme region we decided that after the Laon events we’d stop off for an extra night in Albert to visit a couple of the July 1916 battlefields.

In company with six other intrepid members of Gloucester TSSC we crossed from Dover early on the Thursday morning and then enjoyed an excellent and fairly uneventful drive through rural France, ending up in the central square at Arras with around five hundred other classics just in time for lunch.

Arriving at our camp site just outside Laon  in the late afternoonfate intervened.  Having stopped the car for a few minutes to help move a tent I jumped back in again to find that the power steering had packed in.  Disaster!  The wheel wouldn’t turn at all in one direction and would only move jerkily (a word I never knew existed) in the other.  Doom and gloom descended as I made arrangements for the car to be recovered (likely to take weeks), cancelled our stay in Albert and contemplated the prospect of once again attending a classic event without a classic car.  Fortunately at that moment a fellow traveller (thanks Matt) made the sensible suggestion to see whether the car would steer with the power steering disconnected.  It would – albeit you quickly develop arms like Schwarzenegger.

The rest, as they say, is historique.   Saturday involved a 100+km ‘topless’ route through the local countryside, whilst on  Sunday everyone congregated in the centre of Laon to show off their cars before tearing through the cobbled streets at high speed whilst the local gendarmerie conveniently looked the other way.   Overall a lovely weekend in great company with more than a thousand classic cars as a bonus.  Next stop Le Mans – what can possibly go wrong …….?