A Day To Remember - Niort ('The DSM')

Have you ever had ‘one of those days’? A day you can look back on and laugh, but at the time the laughter was in short supply? Steve and Anna Shaw had such a day. A day they would remember for a very long time...

We were driving to Niort. On a previous trip to the capital of our region, my wife, Anna had lost her purse, including cash, bank cards and family photos. Two weeks later when we were back in ‘Blighty’ a strange package arrived in the post. It was the aforementioned purse, which the owner of a book shop in Niort had found and forwarded. Our mission today was to find this saintly man, shake his hand, thrust a bottle of wine at him and purchase several books from his establishment.

I was ready to park down by the river, but instead Anna guided me to a subterranean car park in the town centre. As we were about to descend into the bowels of the earth we heard a thump from above. After a quizzical glance at each other we thought no more about it. Down the ramp we went, closely followed by a long line of other cars. The ramp then turned into a giant corkscrew, taking us ever deeper; at the bottom of which we arrived at the main body of the car park. This is the moment it all went ‘pear-shaped’.

I realised we still had our ‘roof-box’ on the car and it was too high to get under the reinforced concrete beam in front of us. It also dawned on me that the keys to the storage unit were home on the kitchen table. Having not enough room to pull over and a long line of traffic behind us we were stuck. I did what I always do in such a situation, I started swearing and told Anna it was her fault.

Just then two incredulous car park attendants arrived on the scene. Even though our French isn’t good we could understand they weren’t best pleased and couldn’t believe how stupid we had been. We tried to communicate that we were British hoping this would explain our stupidity. “Desole, desole” Anna kept saying.

After much scratching of heads and shouting into walkie-talkies, they had to close the entire car park, open the entrance barrier and each car had to reverse back up the spiral tunnel, up the ramp and out. A woman directly behind us was virtually in tears with the thought of the manoeuvre which she had been asked to execute. I, myself, found repeated hill starts in reverse while steering in an anti-clockwise spiral fashion extremely challenging and nearly scraped the paint off the back of our new car several times.

When we eventually made it to ground-level there were cars parked on all angles, each with a livid passenger inside waiting to get a glimpse of the guilty party. One final twenty point turn to avoid the height restriction bar we had hit on the way in and we were off, me sitting as low in my seat as was humanly possible and Anna shouting “desole, desole” out of the passenger window.

After parking on the other side of town we did manage to track down the kindly book shop owner and thank him for his good deed. 

A day of highs and lows!