In June 2011, I was all set to head north from Lyon on the 1,700km round trip to the Nürburgring in Germany for the 50th anniversary event held alongside the Renault World Series. A couple of days before, I had spent a whole afternoon giving my car a thorough wash and wax, and on a sunny Thursday morning I began making my way up through Beaujolais country, whereupon it started to pelt down and I drove through a wash of heavy rain and gloomy skies for several hours.

The section of Routes Nationales from Villefranche-sur-Saône through to Dijon is prone to various bottlenecks, so that was the one part where I switched to the autoroute and the péages, but north of Dijon I wasn't intending to take the most direct route towards my ultimate destination. I would instead hold a steady northward charge via the old fortified town of Langres, and then Chaumont, before passing a place holding a special relationship with Queen Geanine, my fourth Renault 4.

Before getting there, however, I stopped in Chaumont to refill the tank, encountering a miserable old git in the service station who repeatedly asked what my pump number was. Having replied three times 'numéro six' he shouted the same question again, before taking a guess at which pump the sole occupant of the garage must have used, and gruffly thrusting my €5 note of change down on the counter. I departed the town muttering curses, and whilst driving through a new industrial estate with roads covered in some kind of yellow-brown muck, a huge lorry passing in the other direction applied some kind of pressure brakes or other gas valve aimed at the road, and absolutely caked the front of my car in what I believe may have been some sort of sewage.

The windscreen went totally white and in a split second I hurriedly tried to recall which stalk operated the wipers to avoid crashing the car. I've never known anything like it happen before, but as is always the way when I embark upon a long journey in my R4, there's a new challenge that awaits. Whoever's been testing me all these years must either be delighted at my success or enraged that I keep evading their efforts to 'get me'. In this case, I suspected that stressed out Petrol Station Man had suffered a fatal stroke shortly after I left, and his ghost had decided to enact immediate revenge. Only ten minutes earlier, the incessant rain had ceased and bright sunshine had emerged, and it was to remain like that until I arrived in Germany, ensuring the front of my car looked filthy and was a major fly magnet at the event.

I reached the end point of my pilgrimage at 6pm, following seven hours of driving, and sought out the secret address that could unlock some mysteries surrounding my car. I had arrived in the town of Bar-le-Duc, located in the département of the Meuse in the Lorraine region of eastern France. Those eager-eyed readers amongst you may know that my R4 was unofficially imported into Britain by a previous owner, having resided beforehand at an address in Bar-le-Duc until being sold at the end of 2006. The original French Certificat d'immatriculation can be seen in entry #MP46 earlier in this section. Above, Queen Geanine is seen on the banks of the River Ornain that runs through the town.

I'm always keen to know about the former life of my Fours, and I had no other logs or details about this, my fourth, aside from the certificate, a bill of sale and a few stickers left in the windscreen when I first acquired it. It would have been interesting to know if the car had always been registered in La Meuse, since until recently French law required a change of vehicle registration if an owner moved to a different département. I had searched for the exact address of the former keeper on the Internet before leaving, but mapping sites could only throw up an approximate location since the precise name didn't seem to exist. I parked in the street seen above, which was the point suggested by Google as the closest match.

I asked some passers by, and tracked down the precise address as seen in the images above, but my inspection of the letterboxes and intercom of the property didn't yield the name I was after. Admittedly, it would be an odd thing to appear at some stranger's door and ask them about a car they owned five years ago, but I thought it might also be a nice surprise to show them that their car still exists and had been kept in good order (sewage issues aside). At least, in Britain the average R4 owner might be enlightened by such a discovery, though here in France the cars were so ubiquitous that they meant nothing special to many folks who had one circa 2006.

I left the town empty-handed (above), perhaps now set to never know what antics my Renault got up to in her early years, and wondering if my publishing all these pictures and details on the Internet might one day prompt somebody to get in touch.

Heading up the hill out of the town, I stopped for the last from my flask opposite one of many wind farms in the region (above), and completed the final stretch of the day's journey to the small town of Saint Mihiel a little further east. This would be my stopover point for the night, chosen for being the location of a youth hostel. I'd had to book it by telephone since the wonders of Internet reservations had not reached this sleepy corner of the world, and it turned out I was the only one there. A woman across the road had to keep an eye out for me and come and open up. There were some sixty-odd beds on two floors and I had the choice of the lot!

My quest for food after all the shops had shut (what few there were in the first place) left me with almost no choice but some bar around the corner that did pizzas. When I entered and ordered, I was then distracted by some wizened old drunk at the bar who frequently coughed and directed globules of spit in doing so. I couldn't really get away whilst I awaited my meal and he talked rubbish at me. Some greasy old straggly-haired guy who owned the place then appeared, and proceeded to splutter with his hand covering his mouth before returning to attend to my food. He then emerged with the box and opened it up, before laying it down on the bar not in front of me but right under the nose of the drunk spitting man. The eight or nine seconds it rest there were agony as I watched intensely for any signs of undesirable seasoning being added.

I went and ate it, and luckily I didn't catch anything, then I rounded off the night with a beer in front of the telly with the hostel to myself. The lady who let me in told me they don't get many people stay, it was a very outdated, musty old place, and it's maintained by some eighty-something-year-old bloke of whom she said, once he goes, the hostel will undoubtedly close. Bit of a shame.

The following morning, after the most magnificently over-indulgent croissant and pain-au-chocolat from the boulangerie across the road, I continued my trek north-eastwards, exiting the Meuse (above and below) on the way to Luxembourg and Germany, and wondering if the car would ever make another return to its roots. Perhaps there's some dark history I'm unaware of, and it's best left buried here forever, or maybe I'll one day receive a curious email explaining all.