Welcome to the "Your First Time at Le Mans" story series.

I decided to break this huge week+ long experience into smaller sized and self-contained stories you can read either in a sequence or in the order you prefer.

I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I did writing them!

Feel free to reply if you have any feedback, or if you had similar experiences and want to share. I read and get back to all replies.

If you really liked the article, it would be amazing for you to share with others who might also enjoy it!

Without further ado, today's story is:

Being my first time at Le Mans, I went with some buddies from the UK who have been going yearly for over a decade.

This means that on Monday June 9th I did not drive straight to Le Mans from my home in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I did a stop in Calais first, to meet my ferry offboarding friends.

They were arriving around 14:30 and I had about a 4 hour trip from home to the Carrefour where we were meeting. I started my journey around 10~10:30, so that accounting for some stops, I could arrive on time. Ended up arriving a bit later due to traffic, but nothing major.

Trip to Calais was quite uneventful. I stopped one or two times for a bathroom break and a coffee. The roads in the Netherlands are quite wide and well maintained. Boring, even, being very straight too and with the maximum speed during the day being 100 km/h. A bit over an hour after departure, I was already in Belgium.

The funniest thing is that even if there's a big blue sign that says "België" when you cross the border, you would just notice it due to the asphalt quality change when crossing.

Being both countries in the EU, the border is virtually non-existent. No tolls, no controls, no nothing. Just continue driving as you were, notice the change in asphalt, signs design, and slowly declining amount of Netherlands plates while increasing the amount of Belgian plates.

After some hours we met with the guys at Cité Europe, in a Carrefour supermarket parking.

We got our first big grocery shopping done, and after loading everything, we were ready for the second stint directly to Le Mans.

I was lent a walkie talkie so that we could communicate between the cars while on a convoy. I was not very much used to stronger British accents. On top of that, the "walkie talkie radio quality" didn't help my side of the understanding. But that is relevant for later.

The other two cars had the toll stickers for easy French tolls usage. For them it was much more important since they were right hand drive cars. This means that for tolls, they had to go out of the car and around to get the ticket or pay. So for me and my left hand drive car it was not much of an issue.

What was an issue was understanding how French tollbooths worked without knowing French or having been told about it previously.