Burgundy fleas

Saturday morning at 6:30 a.m. at the Cours Général de Gaulle in Dijon. It's still dark and not particularly warm at 7°C. Right now I'm longing for gloves for my clammy fingers that would probably be warmer than the flashlights in our hands. And even though I've already had my first coffee today, I'm not very receptive.

This year's flea market is currently being set up by a local association whose name I immediately forgot again on the spacious footpaths of the wide avenue, which are lined with linden or plane trees - which I can barely make out at the moment, but I don't care at the moment. This event only takes place once at the end of September, is therefore highly frequented by sellers and visitors and is therefore a must in our travel plan.

We spent the night just a few hundred meters away on the Cours du Parc, which is a dead end and offers wide parking strips on the side of the road that are free. Only the buses speeding past make the bedroom shake at night, but otherwise we sleep peacefully.
Until the alarm clock rattles cruelly before dawn.

I sneak behind Zappa, who, already in the bargain fever, first takes a look at both sides and actually manages to look for what he wants in the light of the street lamps. And just like that he spotted an iron ship's plane! I then have to ask about the price, even though he actually already knows the numbers up to 10 and if he doesn't understand the answer, you can assume that the price is too high. Here we can agree and the hero is happy to have found a treasure in the cold dawn.

After we have walked both rows for the first time looking on both sides, measuring about a kilometer, it is time for a break. At the Buvet there is coffee as black as the night that has just passed away and just as strong and without milk, but with a lot of sugar that brings all the spirits out of the last sleepy cracks and a croissant dripping with butter and still warm from the oven.

Now I'm ready to face the fleas and we're heading into the second round. But now concentrate your gaze on one side. Lo and behold, I finally find the razor-sharp vegetable peeler that I forgot at home and that now stays in the château. I'm happy to be able to remove the unsightly rind from the carrots and how this peeler peels - ohlala!

Meanwhile the sun is shining from the azure sky and my need to put on the warm hat from the stand over there is melting with the steadily rising temperatures. I stroll a little further and turn around, but there is no Zappa in sight! I look forward, I look back, no Zappa! As if swallowed by the earth! I decide to walk back a little and discover him. He lies on his knees in front of a booth and sticks his nose into an indefinable wooden box that stands on the floor under the table. In fact, all I see is his sexy bottom and feet. He rummages, examines and touches every single item in the box.

At some point, Madame at the stand takes pity and offers me her folding chair. After what feels like infinity and half of her life story, my hero appears with a thick silver steel pipe in his hands and asks me to ask Madame whether her grandfather was an engineer. She replies, a little surprised, "Oui, Grandpére was an optical engineer."
The device turns out to be a collimator that can be used to measure optical systems with an accuracy of a thousandth of a millimeter. I can tell from Zappa's facial expression that this is exactly what he has been dreaming of for ages as a supplement to what he already has at home for his camera tinkering and is now going on his journey through France.

After a whopping five hours we return to the caravan. I'm completely exhausted, after all we covered around eight kilometers at a snail's pace. And while I'm hitting my ear, Zappa goes off again, he probably can't leave the 100-year-old English detective magazine camera at Monsieur's. In the end it does, but instead brings two huge brass compressed air pressure gauges.

I think it's possible that some of you think we're a little crazy, but after the flea market is before the flea market and after all, tomorrow is Sunday. So we drive to Sermesse to spend the night on the banks of the Doubs and hike across a Marché aux puces in the early morning hours. And over another and over another.

On market days, the storm on official and forbidden parking spaces begins before sunrise and even Monsieur Police Munipical is there with a shrill whistle and a perplexed shrug of the shoulders. Everything is allowed as long as it's still possible and if someone parks so stupidly that they're missing an exterior mirror at the end of the market - well, they'll notice, they'll get rid of their fine and that will save them the annoying paperwork. And why get upset and intervene before the first coffee? There are more important things to take care of, for example that the grill is turned on so that the delicious Merguez can soon reach the hungry stomach!

The access to the parking lot is so narrowly blocked by cars that Zappa has to maneuver backwards around the curve for 200m and then drive down a sloping embankment under difficult conditions on a narrow dirt road with three turns. Attention! A late bargain hunter arrives in his sprinter on the super-narrow Chemin. Fright, action and evasion! Zappa elegantly steers the team out of the crash zone, but the château crashes into a small pothole and the new taillight is torn off. Bon merde. But the hero always has advice and a screwdriver and solves the problem, not without cursing the French parking mess.

The day is long and in France people like to take their lunch and the matching rosé to the flea market stall and wait for the afternoon shoppers to buy the last of the atrocities. Just like Zappa on the Toute-la-ville in Bâgé-le-Châtel, no, he doesn't buy the really incredibly ugly Italian water jug, but instead gets it as a gift at the end of the fourth vide grenier of the day, so that it doesn't go back to his home Cellar must be taken back from Madame.

What does he do with it? There are probably plans to give it to my mother-in-law...