Having A Run In With The French Commandos!! Catch Up Blog, Part 1

We left Collioure on Wednesday morning and drove up the mountains heading for an Aire at Mont Louis.

The forecast was correct.  The weather was horrendous, as was the French driving!  They drive very fast in the dry but they don't slow down when the weather deteriorates.  I actually thought that they could be worse drivers than the Aussies but, no, on checking the accident data the Aussies still manage to kill a lot more on their roads per head of population than do the Froggies.  What makes it worse is that Australia has fantastic driving conditions weather wise.  It is a bugbear of mine and I don't know how they will ever improve the Aussie drivers.  

According to the statistics the UK comes in at 3rd lowest, France is 15th and Australia a lowly 25th.

The weather got worse the higher we went and the temperature plummeted to seven degrees ...

But we made it to our parking spot and parked up outside the village wall ...

We went for a walk around a very quiet and creepy village ...

As we walked around the wall we noticed what looked like assault course equipment on the walls ...

There were wires and gantries and cradles all over the shop ...

It got even creepier when we went into some tunnels, using the camera flash to light the way ...

We then got to what looked like an inner wall, when we spotted a chap flying across a flying fox zip wire, wearing full camo gear and carrying a sub machine gun! 

More stuff! 

We then went up another tunnel and headed for the light ...

We were met up at the top by an armed guard jabbering away in French whilst pointing to his machine gun.  We whipped out the phone and asked him to speak slowly into the google translator ...

'Do you want to eat lead English Pig?!!!' came the translation!!

 He didn't really, he just pointed to the boom gate and told us to Fck off ... he was smiling just a little.

When we got out side the main entrance we realised we had been trespassing in the French Commando training fort!

If we had gone through the front gate we would have seen the warning signs!  It just goes to show you shouldn't cut corners and go up the back passage! 

So this was our parking spot on Wednesday ...

But on Thursday morning we awoke to this ...

What a difference - we couldn't see any of this the day before ...

We went back to the fort and from a very long distance I zoomed in and got a shot at our friends ...

Meanwhile whilst we had our backs turned Bombo blacked his face up as he fancied going back inside again.....He was going Commando!