Le mans 24 hr bike racing weekend. 17-18th april

On saturday morning we rushed out of bed at 8 am and woke a load of spanish students up getting ready to hit the train to le mans. We rushed onto the metro and was at the station with plenty of time. Le mans station was huge and had a flip timetable departures board that flickered every second it was actually quite hypnotic to watch. We boarded the train with our first class tickets and found a table seat. It turns out that first class in france isnt much different to 2nd class so lesson learned there. It took over 2 hours to get to le mans the sun was shining and i took out my jasper carrott book called sweet and sour labrador to read, copey was enthrawled in the jeremy clarkson book id bought.

When we got to le mans we wandered to the supermarche to buy beer, guess what no one is allowed to sell beer in le mans over that weekend besides bars and at the race track. So we bought lunch and got a taxi to the hotel campanile it cost us £34 a night it was room 69 and was the penthouse room. It was the plushest place we had seen in a week so we really appreciated it. We jumped into a taxi and headed straight to the race track. This place was full of hairy bikers reving their bikes setting fire to everything. I could tell we were gonna like this place.

It was scorching hot, over the weekend i managed to get the t-shirt tan any brit would be proud off. Copey on the other hand took it safe and put suntan lotion on, while still sporting his carlotti oldham vest. We spent the weekend wandering around the track sitting in stands while watching the racers pull wheelies as they threw the power out of their bikes down the track. It was so loud we could hardly hear each other speak. The beer was reasonable at €4.50 a pint too and no queues for the toilets, but there was the odd person just fast asleep on the grass and a load of smashed bikers wandering around. All in all a great weekend at €49 for a weekend ticket. Just a tip if your thinking of going dont buy anything from the stalls everything goes down to half price with an hour to go on the last day. Ive took a few videos of the race in the day and night so you can get a sense of how load they were and how fast they were going.

We got the tram back to the train station to buy tickets to our next destination that we decided in the end was bordeaux for the wine vineyards. We walked up the road and found captain copeys bar so took a quick snap, obviously copeys dad had been branching out to france.. We went to a bar called twenty when snoop dog walked past , it wasnt him but it looked liked him, copey immediatly cracked a joke that this was the french equivilent of 50 cents bar called twenies cents. We laugh looked over the road and le keywest pub was there and le roadhouse, we then cracked on about there being a turf war with the west and the east side of the le mans rappers town.

Overall Le mans is a very small place, probably only good for the races but if thats what your after then it was awesome i highly recommend going!