I have written about our annual Spider trip to France before. Every year some friends and us set off for a 4-5 day trip to common friends of all of us, Cees and Annelies.
We all know each other through the Dutch Alfa Romeo Spider Register. All of us, were on the board and or several of committees. Over the years we have become good friends. We have known each other for more than 20-25 years. Some 5-6 years ago, Cees and Annelies decided to quit their jobs in the Netherlands, sell their home, and buy and open up an old farm in the Lorraine, France as a Bed & Breakfast. (
https://www.leparadis.nl ).
Since, all of us take a yearly trip in our Spiders to visit them. Cees and Annelies sold everything in the Netherlands, except their Spider, which is now registered on French plates.
These Spider trips are all about driving (we drove about 1800 km in five days), enjoying each other company and eating and drinking.
The latter being a bit of a problem in this part of France, remarkably. This part of France has very few cafe and restaurant. You really need to go to one of the towns, before you find a place to eat or even have a coffee. Which is a bit of a problem, because we don’t like to go into towns, we enjoy driving on the endless rural roads of this gorgeous part of France. So for lunch, we tend to bring some food along, we take coffee in a couple of thermo flasks.
Every day we set off at about 09.30 and we will be back around 16-17.00 hours. Long days, so you do need some food. One day we planned a long trip. We always check for cafe, restaurants along our intended route. Rarely do we find anything, so we take a picknick. This time though our route was supposed to come pass a nice little restaurant. We checked their website, we called them and they told us they would be open, so we made a reservation.
However, in true French fashion, when we arrived they were closed and they did not pick up the phone! So we were stuck for food.
A quick get together and discussion on what to do:
So we drove on, hungry!
So we drove on. At some point we passed a Pizza sign. At least I thought it was just a huge poster and had already driven past it. Luckily, my fellow traveller were a bit more observant. It was an actual pizza dispensing machine!!
None of us had ever seen anything like it. We have quite a number of dispensing machines here in the Netherlands, and also Belgium. You can get milk, bread, vegetables, eggs, even flowers from road side dispensing machines.
But Pizza? So this needed some more investigation!!
This thing was amazing!
Middle of nowhere, but a 6 language menu, including Dutch!!!
It would take debit and credit cards!!
10 different kind of pizza’s and you could order them cold or hot!! Hot you say?? This we had to try for ourselves!!
So we ordered five different pizza’s. Once, the machine had taken our order and payment, the little display showed a video of a Pizza oven with little flames flickering in it!! Also, there was a status display, showing the status of each of our five Pizza. Within 3 minutes the first pizza was ready and came out, piping hot, in a card board box!!
Cees proudly taking delivery of his very first dispensed Pizza!!
It dispensed two Pizza’s about every three minutes. It has two slots from which the Pizza box emerges. All very cool! We had so much fun with this machine, much better than any restaurant!!
We decided to each our Pizza’s on the spot. So I had to take out some of my tools, to cut the Pizza’s. Because they are not cut. They sit in their cardboard box on top of a piece of aluminium foil. So easy to cut, but you do need a knife.
They tasted fine, I have had better Pizza, but I have had a lot worse Pizza as well. You can order them heated or cold. So people might just pick up a Pizza and take it home to heat up back home.
We did not finish all the Pizza's, so we took them with us, the next day on yet another drive.
Obviously, the Pizza’s were cold by this time. But we decided to heat them up the Spideristi way. Popped them on the engine block of one of Spiders, closed the hood and let it cook for 15 minutes.
Worked a treat, so we had warm Pizza again! Picknicking in the French country side does not come any better!
We had a few more “ technical adventures” as well. Among which my Spider’s gear box getting stuck in two gears and Niek’s Spider overheating and blowing its head gasket. More about this in my thread about fiddling with cars later.
Jeroen