The rain in France falls mainly on the Belgians

After a few days of strong wind in Laragne and Apres when it was hangdangler-able but not nice for us floppies, followed by a dash down to Marseilles to scoop up the newly returned Juan, we packed the truck full of toys again with the intention of competing in the 1st Drome / Belgian Open near Die.
Being the organised and experienced competition pilots that we are (uhm...discuss!!) we arrived on the morning of the first task with about -30 minutes to spare! Inscription had finished and though we tried to give the non-english/non-spanish speaking organisation some money and get a GPS download we failed cos they were far more interested in breakfast than anything technological... you can see their point, it did look like a good breakfast ;-)! The comp were already at launch when we finally found the HQ having been directed to the wrong side of Col de Cabre. A rapid exchange in 'Franglish' (a mix of French, English and Spanish) lead us to the launch site at Luc, where we were convinced we would find someone with an Xc Trainer that we could do the 'GPS sex' thing with and suck off all the waypoints for the competition via infrared. WRONG again! Not a single pilot except us two had one so after a hectic 30 mins manually inputting wpt's Juan was set for a 645km task and for some spooky reason the Garmins & XCT were saying the same distance, which NEVER happens so we were probably wrong somewhere along the line. But hey hum, whats a little bit of stress between friends 5 minutes before the window opens?! A good task within the valley was set and we both climbed out. The wind was pretty strong so I kept forward of launch to avoid getting pinned behind the hill. The next 1hour & 15 mins was spent flying circuits, climbing at launch pushing out to the start gate ridge getting flushed, dashing back to the launch hill, soaring up, climbing out and doing it all again 3 times in total. Juan using his 'superior intelligence' ;-) went for a 'superior' glide on his Boom5 to push round the ridge and ended up getting flushed and pinned doing 5kmp forward and...LANDED... so, I'm glad I didn't try that option with the little Vega! Anyway the task ended up getting canceled when the congestus got a little too close and we got rained on just as we were driving away from the landing field. The local campsite was closed, even though we had been assured that it would be open and the prospect of washing in the river was too chilling to even contemplate. We couldn't find any other camping place with even basic facilities so trundled back to Laragne.
It was a real shame that the weather caused the competition to be a non-event 'cos the area is beautiful with great potential for safe tasking.. hopefully the organisation will be a little better managed next time. Its a place I'd certainly love to go back too.
After much picking of brains and scratching of heads back in Laragne we jointly concluded that the week was a washout and decided to run bravely away to see what other fun we could find in France.....