Impending fuel crisis

A quick head’s up to those in France, or planning on coming over this weekend:

I can only speak for the north west, no idea what is going on in the rest of France. Following a hugely unpopular change to work law (way to hand a landslide victory to the other guys), we’ve had a week or so of protests, rioting students, the usual.

Unfortunately now the CGT (hyper militant union) has gotten in on the act, and they have mostly blockaded the fuel storage centre near Rennes (they let some trucks out after 3pm) but the refinery and storage in Vannes (I think) and Donges (near Nantes) are completely blocked.

The reaction has been exactly as expected. Two days of panic buying, queues at the pumps that cross car parks and block roads.

Today? They’re starting to run dry. Both supermarkets in the town where I work have run out of fuel. I told mom to go into an Élan station and paid €1,44 a litre for SP-95 (supermarket price is about €1,22). Went in, filled up, paid, stroked a placid cat on the way out. This turns out to have been a good decision. The supermarket we had planned to try had gendarmes (police) all over the place, and the station closed shortly afterwards. Dunno what was going on, but glad I wasn’t in the middle of it.

This picture taken once most of the excitement was over (was shopping):

Let’s hope it gets resolved quicker than the September 2000 fuel crisis in the UK.

Thanks for the heads up Rick. We are going Calais, Gent, Antwerp… so should be o.k. I shouldn’t need to fill up until we are in Belgium and possibly The Netherlands anyway. But I’ll make sure we fill up on the way back in Belgium.
n.b. Last year on the way back we were going to stop off to eat between Gent and Calais but all the restaurants in the motor services had closed, IIRC it was only about 8p.m.! Can anyone recommend a reasonable motorway restaurant Antwerp to Gent?

Woulter: :-) I wonder what happened to my Astrix books, I can’t recall seeing them for forty years!

Answering partially my own question. I can recommend on the A16/E19 just north of the Belgium/Netherlands border: https://www.laplace.com/nl/locations/detail/la-place-breda-hazeldonk/
Not cheap but freshly cooked and good portions.
Coming back we failed to find a decent stop SW of Antwerp we saw a massive tall triangular topped advertising hording with a knife and fork on it for unofficial slightly off road services. It turned out to be a mcdonalds so cheap and cheerful.