Stihl haven't found what I'm looking for...

This is what took us on a road trip to up to Blois a couple of weeks ago.

My brother Richard went on to an auction site where the pompiers at Blois were selling off some redundant equipment. He was interested in a Land Rover but bidding got out of hand. So rather than come away empty handed he bid on a chain saw, though not actualy the one above. Now he did this from his house in Provence  where he could make use of it - the problem was it was in the fire station at Blois! So we live in the same region, could we nip up and collect it? It's actually a 250km round trip for us but we agreed to do it, against our better judgement - he is my brother after all. The problem was that we would then have to get it to him.

I decided that we could make a road trip out of it and take in one of the few Loire Valley Chateaux we hadn't visited,Chateau Beauregard - that will be another post, first we had to find the pompiers! We don't have sat-nav but it looked straightforward enough on googlemaps. Of course didn't know there was a bit of a one-way system going on which meant  we got a wee bit lost. I knew it was in an industrial area in the north of the city so just followed my nose. Unfortunately it didn't seem to know the way! After some mis-guidance from a local resident, some cross words between driver and co-pilot and the help of a young man's smartphone we arrived at 11-55...oh oh!

This could have been disastrous,how do you kill two hours on an industrial estate? but no they couldn't have been nicer. Unfortunately the said chainsaw,which had not been used for six months (and looked a bit rough),it had a ticket marked OK on a date that long ago, failed to kick into life even after quite a few hefty tugs from a large fireman plus a new spark plug being fitted! We let him know we were not happy,although our body language when we arrived had probably already made him arrive at that conclusion. The solution after a bit of frowning and huffing and puffing was to go into the storeroom and bring us the one photographed above which started first time and looked a lot better than the one he had won in the auction...now how do we get it to Richard in his other house in Paris?