Aigues-Mortes

The drive here was pretty eventful, but not in a good way. Road construction put us on many detours that actually added 1 ½ hours to our already long drive. It was around 9 o’clock when I was about to enter a roundabout. A taxi had signaled to leave the roundabout and at the last minute swerved back into it, I wasn’t anticipating this. As it was late and there was barely any traffic on the road I was driving faster into the roundabout than I would have if it was during the day. That being said, I had to slam on the breaks to avoid hitting the taxi, which luckily I did. But after the sudden stop the van shut off and would not turnover. There was barely enough power to even light the interior light. Julie and I pushed the van onto the corner of the roundabout, rather then leaving it in a live entry lane. We put out our triangle and Julie adorned the vest and held a flashlight. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out why the dam van wouldn’t start. I even tried hooking the leisure battery up to the main battery with the booster cables to give it a charge to see if that helped matters. It did not. I asked Julie to see if she could flag someone over, so as Julie would tell you, she was waving her arms “as John McClain did in Die hard 2 when he was trying to signal the planes to land” flashlight in hand. Anyway, many cars passed by without stopping until one lady with her brand new car decided to see if she could help us. After a short while of trying to boost the car without any success, she offered to drive behind us with her hazards on so we could roll the van closer to town. We only rolled about 200 meters before we decided that the van probably wouldn’t make it up the hill that was approaching. Because we were convinced that the battery was the problem we started looking into where we could find a gas station to purchase one, however the nearest one was about 5 km away (in a straight line from our current position). Not knowing if it was a good idea or not, we decided to see if we could replace the car battery with the leisure one, it was then that I realized what the problem was. Thankfully the only problem with the car was a loose connection with the battery post. I tightened it and off we drove. Our enjoyment though was short lived, because we noticed immediately that the headlights were not working properly. We had no normal lights, they were working more like daytime running lights, but the high-beams still worked. After an extremely stressful drive, we finally arrived at our destination. We also learned at this time that the spot we had chosen to park at was not free, so we hoped that we might escape in the morning without having to pay.