Broken!

Our good friends drove us back 140 km into the mountains to see what the state of affairs was at the garage where our car is resting.

This picture shows the mangled oil sump, which was destroyed by hitting a quite small rock that had fallen into the road.

In principle, the sump could have been replaced today, but when the garage dismounted the old sump, they found that there was more serious damage to the engine. The points marked "A" and "B" in this picture show two unmendable damage points: the nearly rectangular hole at "A" is particularly bad. The result is that the only "cure" is to rebuild the engine with a new cylinder block. It will take > 15 days, and cost > ?3000. The cost is substantially more than the car is worth. If it were in the UK, I would scrap it: but out of the UK it is a bureaucratic problem not to return the car to its country of origin. The outcome is that the car will have to be repaired, we will have to return to France in > 15 days, we shall have to find a way of getting up to Meyrueis in the Gorges de la Jonte without friends to help... A nightmare.

At least we are with friends, and one possibility is that they will bring us back to Oxford when they return to the UK on Sunday (but that restricts the amount of wine they can carry: also serious!).

Now to more cheerful matters. We drove through more torrential rain to Meyrueis, but it cleared up nicely in the late afternoon. We thought that we should get nice views of the Millau Viaduct, but unfortunately, as we came down a bit to its level, we entered cloud. So this is what we saw! The clouds were swirling around, but luckily, just as we were leaving the viewing area on the slip road, the clouds cleared and I was able to take this final picture as we drove off. You can see that there are still clouds in layers above and below us.