It's happening again. This time it's two old ladies who break off their conversation to watch us chug around the corner, their faces breaking into broad grins as we get closer. As we pass, both lift their arms in salute. I raise my hand through the open roof and wave back. Our French guide, who's helping us familiarise ourselves with the car's creaking controls, is smiling. 'It's because the 2CV was the first car normal people could afford,' she says, turning around to look through the back window at the delighted expressions we've left in our wake. 'It brings back so many memories. Everybody in France had one.'
Everybody in France - and my mum. The Citroen 2CV - better known on the Continent as the deux chevaux because of its minimal horsepower - was an attractive option to cash-strapped Brits in the early 1980s, too. It did the job of puttering from A to B with a certain Gallic je ne sais quoi, and its sleek, curvy design and roll-back roof made it pretty much equivalent to a sports car in my young eyes. My mum, alas, had to get rid of hers after a nasty collision with a speeding policeman. She survived. The car didn't. But it left behind happy memories of pre-seatbelt days spent standing on its back seat as we drove to school.
And that's why we're here. My friend suggested we go to France to try out a new company, Les Belles Échappées, which restores and rents vintage 2CVs for customers to drive around the French countryside. This sounds perfect to me. I imagine winding along lavender-fringed roads while Provençal sunshine beats down through the open roof onto Ambre Solaire-scented necks, but this dream evaporates when my friend tells me it's the Flanders village of Clairmarais, an hour's drive south of Calais, we're heading to. What could possibly be worth seeing, I wonder, in that bleak corner of northern France, pressed up against the Belgian border? Nobody tarries there. Tourists zip through on their way south from the ferry ports, and even the economic migrants, until recently incarcerated at nearby Sangatte, stayed against their will.
My preconceptions start to be challenged as soon as we leave the bargain-booze warehouses that cluster around the port behind. Like so much of rural France, Flanders is beautiful. There may not be any vineyards or sunflower fields around here, but there are also no tourists. Our drive to La Sapinière hotel in the lovely hamlet of Wisques, where we will be staying the night, takes us through gently rolling countryside that gives way to crêpe-flat plains and marshland criss-crossed with silvery canals that glint in the sunlight. By the time we pick up our 2CV from the tumbledown 17th-century farm that Les Belles Échappées operates out of, I'm boring my friend to death about undiscovered corners of Europe and la France profonde.
I may have some trouble getting to grips with the dashboard-mounted, pull-in-pull-out gearstick, and the grinding noise of the engine as I push the accelerator to the floor might be akin to a plane, but I've never had this much fun in the far-more-modern and far-more-boring Citroen C3 I drive at home. We drive through small towns and tiny villages, leaving happy, waving people behind us wherever we go. It's a wonderful feeling, spreading such joy. The sun is out, fat bees the size of ping-pong balls bounce off the windscreen, and the fields we whiz through alternate between custard-yellow rapeseed and grassy meadows in which lie creamy cows more doe-eyed than Brigitte Bardot.
The rich soil of war poet John McCrae's 'Flanders fields' is now stuffed to bursting with potatoes, cauliflowers, carrots and all manner of enormous, earth-fresh legumes. 'A vendre' signs are at every farm gate. If the Great Plains are the breadbasket of America, Flanders is the well-stuffed bicycle pannier of France.
We lunch on cheese, charcuterie and fresh baguettes at Bon Accueil, a simple, canalside cafe in Salperwick, while fellow customers get up to look at our parked car and pose for photographs beside it. 'I don't think much to this cheese,' I tell my friend, holding up the pale, crumbly slice I've just taken two large bites from. 'It's so creamy and salty it's barely got any flavour.' 'That's butter, you idiot,' she says, slicing off a bit of her own and spreading it on her bread.
After lunch, my friend takes the wheel and I squeeze myself into the passenger seat, knees almost touching the glass. I realise I've been hunching to drive, and my line of sight is actually a couple of inches above the windscreen. On we go, through the village of Moringhem, which is in the midst of its annual scarecrow festival. There are effigies everywhere - outside houses, tied to telegraph poles, on benches in the centre - and, though most are of French politicians and TV personalities that we don't recognise, we do spot, in addition to Bob the Builder, Sarkozy and Carla Bruni sitting hand-in-hand on a wall.
The use of French/Flemish patois on the accompanying placards means the jokes are lost on us. Flanders is just a waffle's throw from the Low Countries, and road names here are just as likely to end in 'straet' as they are to start with 'rue'. Many older people speak only Flemish, and the distinctly un-Gallic architecture - all ornate shuttered windows and angular thatched roofs - wouldn't look out of place in a Vermeer painting.
On our way to medieval St Omer, we stop to stretch our cramped legs in the grounds of a convent just down the road from our hotel. Remembering my mum's 2CV, I suggest we see if this model has the same removable back seat as hers. We're delighted to discover it does. We lift it out and set it on the grass. We sit for a while, letting the afternoon sun spread across our faces, until a nun appears in the doorway to ask us what we're doing. We explain about Les Belles Échappées, and she takes a promotional leaflet from the glove compartment. She'll have to ask the mother superior, she says, but she'd love to hire all six of the company's 2CVs so the nuns can have a day out.
We're still giggling about this the next day, as we eat lunch at the wonderful Restaurant Aquar'aile in Calais. As we work our way through a selection of scallop hors d'oeuvres - accompanied by pork and a cream of mushroom cappuccino in one incarnation, combined in a casserole with lobster in another - we look back fondly over the 50 or so miles we covered the day before. By the time we've finished our sea bass and red mullet, which are so fresh you can still taste the tang of the sea, we've packaged the whole 24 hours into a series of anecdotes ready to present to our partners along with the duty-free bottle of gin.
Countless Left Bank philosophers have spent lifetimes trying to get to the heart of the French psyche. A little car with a roll-back roof and an engine that sounds like a pneumatic drill allowed us to do it in an instant.
Essentials
Getting there
SeaFrance (0871 222 2500; seafrance.com) has 30 daily crossings Dover to Calais, with online fares for a car and up to five passengers from £29 each way.
Where to stay
Hotel La Sapinière (00 33 3 2193 2872; sapiniere.net) in Wisques works with Les Belles Echappées to offer packages including rental of a 2CV, double room, dinner and breakfast from £105 per person, based on two sharing.
Where to eat
Aquar'Aile (00 33 3 2134 0000; aquaraile.com) in Calais, in a prime location overlooking the beach, is one of the finest seafood restaurants in the area. The Toques d'Opale group of 13 restaurants in the Flanders area have a reputation for using high-quality local ingredients (toquesdopale.com).
Where to hire your 2CV
Les Belles Echappées (00 33 2 2198 1172; les-belles-echappees.com) offers discovery tours of the Nord Pas de Calais region with Citroën 2CVs, and of the St Omer region with electric E-Solex bikes. A full day's 2CV rental is £124. Half a day's E-Solex rental is £14.
