Yup, there's a Part 3 to this day. Team Beck doesn't fool around when travelling.

In Part 1, we visited Amiens, and remember, we left the hotel only around 11:30 that morning. In Part 2, our mood changed to reflective as we toured the South African War Memorial and Delville Wood Cemetery. Now it was time to get closer to the main purpose of our travel to Europe.

A quick reminder of why we were doing this trip

For those amongst you who have been reading from the beginning (see list of posts on our travels to date at the end of this post), you'll remember that the main reason for our trip was to go to ma nièce's wedding and for my longtime friend and I to see each other after many years of continental drift.

Some reminders of the trip schedule - because it's about to get a lot more complicated

If you've been following the trip, then you'll know that Day 6 was Tuesday, 15 August, the day before the wedding. We had arrived in the region of France where the wedding celebrations were to be held, Pas-de-Calais, the previous afternoon. What I didn't tell you about Day 5 was that once we'd unpacked, we headed off that Monday evening to the house of the groom's parents in Condette for one of the many pre-wedding celebrations. It was there we picked up the extent and diversity of the guests (a couple of hundred people from at least ten countries, all staying kinda somewhere nearby, scattered throughout the region) and the complexity of the wedding plan for Wednesday.

• The wedding itself, the civil ceremony required by French law, would be at 2:00 at the Mairie in Condette not far from the groom's parents' house.
• There would be a reception at the Domaine de la Traxène afterwards, followed by another reception there in the evening. Some of the wedding party were planning to stay at the Domaine on the Tuesday and Wednesday nights, including the mother of the bride, my great friend.
• This Domaine was far away from Condette. We hadn't yet grasped how far.
• There would also be pre-celebrations at the Domaine from 4:00-8:00 on the Tuesday.

What on earth is a Domaine, we wondered? Madame Google responded that it's a Field. With a capital F.

Why this had the potential to go south

What could possibly go wrong with such a clear plan and Team Beck so skilled at pulling success from the jaws of disaster (remember the slide into the train at the Gare du Nord two minutes before departure?), you ask?

• We hadn't really figured out where this Domaine was in relation to Condette and Hardelot, which were very close to each other.
• Tim hadn't quite twigged to the timing of the Tuesday evening event. This only dawned on me as we were wandering around the cemetery in the late afternoon, with the sun still high in the sky. Coming from Joburg, we're conditioned, like poinsettias, to expect twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness, with not a lot of dawn or dusk to separate them. Somehow he thought it started at 8:00 in the evening. (Remember, dear reader, we left Delville Wood around 5:00 Tuesday afternoon unencumbered by lunch.)
  -Delville Wood was more than an hour and a half away from Hardelot over those narrow, winding country roads.
• The "I'm hungry" noises from the back seat were getting louder.
• We needed to change from our tourist clothes to pre-wedding celebration clothes, so had to go back to Hardelot - no chance of just going to the Domaine.

It gradually dawned on some of us that we would be late for the pre-wedding celebration. Ma nièce gets particularly niggled when people are late, especially if they are late on "African time". We were about to be guilty, guilty, guilty. Since ma nièce had picked up her love of punctuality from her mother, I wasn't looking forward to breaking the news to my great friend that not only would we be late, we'd be spectacularly late for the do.

Well, nothing for it but take our lumps and get there as quickly as possible. I sent a WhatsApp message to my friend saying we'd get back to Hardelot by 6:30 and would do our best to get to the Domaine at least before the festivities ended.

Her response: "Can you save my life?"

Things were looking up

Well, for us, at least. A bullet was about to be dodged. I'd been concerned that our years of physical separation were about to suffer a wedding-related blow along the lines of "For crying out loud, you came all this way for the wedding and you can't even make the pre-party?" and was anticipating at least a blast of frost over WhatsApp. Instead I got a plea for help. Looking up indeed.

Although things were taking a turn for the better for us, as far as my friend was concerned, I knew she hadn't mellowed THAT much over the years, so something serious must have happened.

Heartened by the lack of claws and teeth in her reply, I ventured to ask her, "How can I help?"

The crisis only SuperKiligirl could address

She explained briefly that her suitcase had been left behind in Hardelot in some confusion over cars (there were a lot of cars involved, and their family is big. That's not surprising). The mother of the bride would be without her toilette, and worse, without her two dresses for the day of the wedding, one for the afternoon and one for the evening.

SuperKiligirl to the rescue! I messaged. A chance to redeem ourselves, I thought.

Image source

(Yeah, that's me.)

Crisis? What crisis?

Okay, guys, I hear you asking why this was a crisis. Just trust me when I say that wedding wear, especially for the mother of the bride, is in a league of its own - because, well, photos. Although these are not fussy people, they would still want to enjoy their photos and nobody would have wanted mom's jeans to overshadow the bride's brocade in digital perpetuity.

So a lightning fast turnaround in Hardelot

Ag, perhaps not lightning so much as accelerated turtle. Here's our route back from Longueval to Hardelot and then out to the Domaine.

First, we made the mistake of listening to Waze about how to get back to our hotel. It sent us off somewhere in Hardelot that wasn't our hotel, causing us to lose about ten minutes on the stretch we thought would be easy, at a time when seconds counted. We finally fired Waze, and used the English-mute car GPS to find our hotel. We ran to our rooms, changed in nanoseconds, and hot-footed it to the chambre d'hôte where the precious suitcase was to be picked up. At least that part would be easy, because my friend's sister-in-law would be there waiting for us with the suitcase.

Next time, I'll pay closer attention to detail

We had driven past the place but hadn't been to the house itself. When we pulled in, I bounded out of the car and looked around for the sister-in-law. Not a sausage in sight. The place had two floors of apartments all fronting the parking lot, so I did what any sane person would do - I rang all the doorbells and banged on all the doors until someone answered.

Finally, a woman came to the door, and explained (most kindly, considering the circumstances) we had the wrong house. That house up the hill is where you want to go, she advised, pointing helpfully. No recriminations for disturbing the peace. This day was turning out to be awfully forgiving.

Get the frikken suitcase and go!

Ai yi yi. It was already past 7:30 and we'd learned it would take at least 45 minutes to get to the Domaine over unfamiliar, winding country roads. I ran up the hill, with Tim and Emma following in the car. Sister-in-law was exactly where she was supposed to be with suitcase in tow. After a quick exchange of pleasantries (mwah, mwah - we're from Quebec, after all) and with the precious cargo loaded, it was time to take our departure from Hardelot and embark on our journey to the Domaine.

On our way

Reluctantly, we rehired Waze to tell us how to get there and set off for the triple purposes of saving the damsel in distress, feeding the hungry masses (for the noise from the back seat was getting louder still) and oh yes, joining in the pre-wedding festivities.

This first drive to the Domaine was really scary. Blind turns, speeding up through the fields and slowing down through the villages, oncoming drivers with too much sang-froid and disrespect for what could barely be considered lanes for our taste, missed turns (because Waze had a way of misguiding us at some road splits), fear of roaming cattle (we'd been warned to watch out for wild boar, cattle and tractors in the night) and general stress along with increasingly plaintive calls for food from the back seat meant it was one of our less pleasant drives.

Arrival

We made it before sunset!

We got to the Domaine around 8:30 to find it bathed in warm sunset light, to find my friend happy we were there with her suitcase and glad to see us...and to learn that she had managed to save us some food.

We were even treated to a designer sunset view - the white cows against the green grass in the warm evening sunlight, with a backdrop of wind turbines done their turning for the day couldn't have been more quintessentially modern pastoral.

Turning around, we were greeted by this view of the village.

Pre-nuptual celebrations!

Inside the hall, the proceedings were much, much louder.

We scarfed down the delicious remnants my friend had managed to hoard for us and got into the spirit of the soirée.

A delightful, funny slide show by the mothers of the fiancés on the lives of their two amazing children (in this case, it's true - they are both amazing) was followed by games and more festivities. Here's a sample:

Hint: shoes played a key role in this game.

We drove home more or less the same route as our stress-riven drive out, with Waze still steering us wrong occasionally and us not caring any more, and fell into bed exhausted some time around midnight.

The moral of the story

Is there one?

All's well that ends well?

Sometimes s**t happens when you travel, but it usually works out?

Google is better than Waze for navigating French country roads?

Team Beck is blessed with blind luck?

Frankly, I'm not sure. At this stage, a month after Day 3, all I can say is

• My friend got her suitcase and so had the two dresses she had planned to wear for her daughter's wedding, instead of, say, jeans
• We got food
• My friend is still talking to me >phew<
• It was a fantastic evening
• Thanks to Waze getting us there, we were able to navigate back in the inky darkness. And no wild boars or tractors were harmed during our return drive.

Tomorrow would be the big day

Tune in soon for the next exciting installment of the Beck Trek - Day 7 - the Wedding of the Century.

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Images by @kiligirl, @tim-beck and Emma Beck except where otherwise credited.

Other posts to date on our trip:

https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-6-part-2-team-beck-takes-a-reflective-turn-in-delville-wood-somme-region-of-france
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-6-the-beck-trek-hits-the-north-of-france-amiens
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-5-team-beck-moves-from-paris-to-pas-de-calais-in-the-north-of-france-and-nobody-dies
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-4-in-paris-for-team-beck-notre-dame-the-musee-d-orsay-and-le-marais
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-3-in-paris-for-team-beck-hop-on-hop-off-bus-tour
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-2-in-paris-for-team-beck-boat-cruise-down-the-seine
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/day-2-in-paris-for-team-beck-a-visit-to-the-louvre
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/two-weeks-ago-yesterday-we-were-wandering-around-the-centre-pompidou-in-paris
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/paris-day-1-part-2-of-several-posts-on-our-trip-to-paris-pas-de-calais-bruges-and-amsterdam
https://steemit.com/travel/@kiligirl/whirlwind-tour-of-paris-pas-de-calais-bruges-and-amsterdam

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