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Originally Posted by John Elwin
We had an interesting time but really the wrong weekend to be in Belgium as every single village seemed to have a festival going on, which led to a few unintended diversions from the Road Book.
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This reminds me of holidays that I and my family spent in Brittany in the late 70s. We never had any problems going to our destination by car, but on every return journey to St Malo we encountered a town that seemed to always have a festival happening that closed the place to through traffic. No matter that after the first occasion we always stopped there to check if we would have the same problem on our return, we always did.
Unfortunately this was, of course, way before GPS route planners and we just had to follow the diversion signs. The problem was that the signs only appeared to be placed at the start of the diversion and after that you were on your own on how to get back on track, so to speak.
Mind you, having said that, my son and I went to Oulton in his pretty new Range Rover a week ago for the BTCC races and even with it's very fancy GPS system we encountered problems on the return journey. Although most of the time the screen displayed the roads that were congested, etc., when we got to the point where we should have joined the M62, the highways authorities had just closed the entry due to an incident and that initially stumped the GPS and no matter which way we went, it kept trying to send us back to the entry point. In the end my son had change the settings to avoid motorways which eventually sent us on a route that a little way along my son recognised from his travels to Manchester for his work.
It then happened again when trying to leave the M62 as the off ramp was closed due to flooding which caused tailback of traffic. Of course, drivers soon started using the hard shoulder which ended when two police cars came flying through on blues and twos responding to something, and started taking down the reg numbers of the offenders.