Mrs. Kong and I are celebrating our 15th anniversary and we wanted to do a “big” trip. Since I’m a cheap bastard who still lives in his starter-home, we can afford to do something like this every so many years.
So, where to go? For some reason we keep being drawn back to France. Despite the fact that I do to the French language what Joe Pesci did to Frank Vincent in Goodfellas. We went to France on our honeymoon and we’ve been back a few times since.
Rather than risk missing a connection, we drove to Detroit and took an Air France 787 nonstop to Charles de Gaulle. The 787 was a nice ride.
CDG is a pretty good ways from downtown Paris. A cab ride is expensive, and you can end up sitting in traffic. We took the RER (commuter train) into town, changed to the Metro (subway), which took us to within a block of our hotel. The only problem with the Metro is you may have to drag your bags up stairs. The train ride took maybe 30 minutes and only cost a few Euros.
We spent the first couple days in Paris to clean up a few loose ends. The last time we were in Paris the Seine was so flooded that a lot of the museums had been closed. We wanted to see the Musee d’Orsay, which has one of the largest collections of impressionist art. We also wanted to go up in the Eiffel Tower, which I have never done as many times as I’ve been here.
Paris isn’t Disneyland. I could probably say the same for Manhattan. People live there and they’re trying to get to work, get their kids to school and get dinner on the table same as everywhere else. It’s a big city and people have places they need to get to. That being said, I have yet to encounter the stereotypical “rude Frenchmen”. Most folks are happy to help you out if you need directions or aren’t sure how something works.
Tips on driving in Paris — don’t.
We used the RER and the Metro to get around. You really don’t want to drive there.
Unless you’re a true bicycle geek you might want to skip this part.
One of the most famous bike builders in this bike obsessed country was Alex Singer.
The son of Alex Singer’s original partner still runs the shop.
Since it was a fairly easy walk from the hotel, we decided to make a pilgrimage. Mostly so I could say I’d been there. He said he’d build me a bike for 6,000-9,000 Euros. He would only sell me a complete bike, because “An Alex Singer bike must look like an Alex Singer bike.” I can appreciate that kind of dedication. Someday I may take him up on it.
The streets of Europe are not paved with gold, but they do some things better than us. One of them is public transportation.
As long as they’re not having one of their frequent strikes, the trains are pretty efficient. Strikes, when they occur, generally last a day and don’t affect the whole system. You will probably still be able to get where you’re going, it will just take longer.
I planned the trip so that we would get out of Paris on a Saturday morning, before the demonstrations, which have become a regular thing.
To my knowledge, Lyft is not available in Paris, but Uber is. Also, some of the cab companies like G7 have an app that works like Uber/Lyft. That can be useful for bridging the language barrier because the app knows where you want to go.
(Delivers a solid right jab to the French language — it’s on the ropes!)
A cab ride took us across town to Gare du Lyon, where we rode the TGV down to Aix-en-Provence.
I’ve never had any trouble at the Paris train stations but I’m told that they’re popular spots for pickpockets. Keep an eye on your bags.
The TGV is a marvel of engineering. If we were a civilized country we’d have these things. No security lines. No getting groped by the TSA. Just buy your tickets online or at a kiosk, scan your boarding pass and get on.
My GPS speedometer showed us traveling between 170 and 190 mph in perfect comfort. The hydraulic suspension actually banks into the turns like a race car on an oval track. The trip from Paris to Aix-en-Provence took a mere three hours. Door-to-door I would say it’s as fast as flying on a trip of this length (460 miles or so). If you factor how long it takes to get to the airport, plus the time it takes getting groped and so on.
Now the TGV isn’t perfect. There are only so many high-speed lines. Getting from Point A to Point B might require changing trains or even switching to a “regular” train for the smaller cities. I figured some city pairings might be better served by car, so we elected to drive the rest of the trip.
At the TGV station in Aix we picked up our rental car for the rest of the trip.
I had reserved a Renault Talisman wagon. Roughly the size of my wife’s A4 station wagon. The rental clerk asked why we wanted such a “big” car.
I liked this car so much I’d probably buy one if I could. Of course Renault hasn’t been in the US in a long time and Americans hate station wagons for some reason so they’re tough to get here. Audi doesn’t even import Mrs. Kong’s A4 Avant any more. You have to buy the Allroad, which has a bunch of plastic crap on it so it can pretend to be an SUV. Because god-forbid someone doesn’t drive an SUV.
Somehow we got lucky and got the top-of-the-line model with all the bells and whistles. Heads-up-display, massaging seats, adaptive cruise control. Supposedly it could even parallel park itself, but I wasn’t brave enough to try it.
The first 10 minutes in a rental car are always stressful. Now multiply that by the fact that you’re in a foreign country, maybe somewhere you’ve never driven before, and the car is talking to you in a foreign language.
I strayed across the lane for a second and the car made a loud farting noise. No, really, that wasn’t me! Rather than shake the steering wheel like my car does, Renault’s lane departure warning just makes noise. So now I have a car that speaks French and has flatulence.
Aix was a tough place to drive last time I was there and it’s tougher now. Some of the streets in the center of town (where our hotel happens to be) are now pedestrian only. Great for reducing congestion, not so good for navigation. The cabs and delivery trucks have some sort of secret handshake that lowers the barriers, but we don’t.
If you happen to find a parking spot on the street, you had better be the king of parallel parking. It will probably be a tight fit. If you don’t see a parking meter, there will probably be a kiosk nearby where you pay for parking and put a ticket on your dash.
Worse, the navigation system in the car, I’ll call her “Bridgette”, keeps trying to send us down the blocked streets. Google Maps, which I call “Betty”, doesn’t do any better. After about the third trip around town listening to Betty and Bridgette argue with each other, we give up on technology and start following the signs with the name of our hotel.
In my experience, most of the French I encountered spoke at least some English. I felt obligated to try French and then switch to English after I’d left the bloody corpse of the French language rotting on the side of the road. I figure you get points for trying.
It’s always good to memorize a few useful phrases like:
“Hello”
“Bonjour!”
“Please”
“S'il vous plaît”
“Thank you”
“Merci beaucoup”
“Don’t shoot! I’m Canadian!”
“Ne me tire pas dessus! Je suis Canadien!”
If you drive a little ways east of Arles you’ll start seeing signs for “Aqueduct Romain” (Roman Aqueduct). It sits by the side of a country road between two olive groves.
If you follow the aqueduct (actually two side-by-side) you come to a hill where water wheels once turned flour mills for the town of Arles.
What amazes me the most about France is how many historical sites are just sitting by the side of road. Here in the States, someone would be charging admission, assuming we hadn’t torn it down and built a golf course on it.
In general, European cities tend to be modern on the outside and get older the closer you get towards the center. Driving around the outskirts of a French city is usually no big deal once you master the roundabouts.
It’s when you get into the “old” city that it turns into a maze of narrow one-way streets with pedestrians, scooters and cyclists coming at you from all directions. Think Boston but worse.
Watch out for trams. The tracks often run on the streets and the trams move swiftly and silently. I accidentally turned in front of one in Bordeaux. Could have been messy.
Most of the bicycles I saw were older and looked like they were used for transportation rather than recreation. The riders generally exhibited what I call “NAFD”, or No Apparent Fear of Dying. Beware.
Those stupid electric scooters have found their way to France. You know, the ones that litter the sidewalks of San Francisco and Venice Beach. The riders are every bit as fearless as the cyclists so keep your head on a swivel.
The French drivers seem to take it all in stride, even in situations that would have people in the US shooting at each other. The worse I ever got was a dirty look from a driver in Nantes, and to this day I have no idea how that particular intersection was supposed to work.
Nantes, by the way, is a nice little city in the Brittany region, near the mouth of the Loire River. It looks like a smaller version of Bordeaux, which looks like a smaller version of Paris.
The old shipyard in Nantes was converted to park, where some ambitious artists and engineers have created giant mechanical animals.
After a day or so I was able to switch the car’s navigation from French to “British English”. Bridgette was replaced by “Brenda the Brit”, who sounded like an extra from Downton Abbey.
“Enter the roundabout and take the third exit”
“Yes m’lady!”
Parking in France can be an adventure. Basically, they’ve got a lot of people living fairly close together. They’re not going to waste valuable downtown real estate on parking lots. Unlike downtown Columbus Ohio, which has so much surface parking it looks Berlin circa 1945.
A lot of parking garages are underground and the spaces are tight. In one of them I had to fold the side mirrors on the Renault and back it in with the parking sensors yelling at me on three sides.
In contrast to the narrow city streets, the French Autoroutes (highways) are modern, well maintained, and you pay for the privilege. It seemed like I was paying roughly 5 EU in tolls every 100 kilometers or so.
Speed limit on the Autoroutes is 130 kph (80 mph). Speed cameras and high fuel prices seem to have slowed people down from what I remember. In some sections they even check your average speed, I’m guessing by way of license plate readers over a fixed distance.
The fastest thing on the Autoroute is a white, contractor van. Coincidentally, that’s also the fastest thing on a US highway. Unless they’re on their way to my house. In which case they’ll be there sometime next week. Maybe. If they feel like it.
For a change of pace I switched the voice on the car to Australian English. For the rest of the trip we had “Sheila” telling us to “Turn riiiiiight in one hundred meters. Then enter the roundabout and take the thaaaaahd exit.”
A word about meters and kilometers. I find it’s easier just to “think” in kilometers rather than trying to convert units all the time. If it’s 200 kilometers to Saint Fromage, and I’m going 100 kph, I’ll get to Saint Fromage in 2 hours. If the speed limit is 100 furlongs-per-fortnight, I’ll just put the furlong-o-meter on 100. It’s all the same.
If you decide to visit Le Mont St-Michel be advised that it is very crowded with tourists. Our “hotel” such as it was turned out to be above a bar. You park in a large parking lot on the mainland and take a bus across the causeway to the island. From where the bus drops you off, it’s still a pretty fair walk, especially if you’re doing a “bag drag” like we were.
Read the fine print when you book a room in a historic building. At Mont St-Michel I had to schlep our bags up five flights of narrow, spiral stairs. My back may never recover.
On average I would say the French are better drivers than we are. Granted that bar has been set pretty low.
They generally drive in the right lane and pass in the left lane, as nature intended. If someone is overtaking you in the left lane, they will put their left turn signal on as a request for you to move over. I tried it a couple times and amazingly enough it works! In the US it would probably just get you a dirty look (if they noticed at all), an obscene gesture or an exchange of gunfire.
I saw very little left lane camping or weaving between lanes as is common here. I don’t think we got passed on the right the entire time we were in France.
The Renault was quite happy on the highway. It’s little turbo-diesel engine averaged 40+ mpg (converting from liters/100km) but seemed to have plenty of power.
One thing that hasn’t changed from previous visits is French radio stations are uniformly awful. It’s all either bad Euro-pop or bad French covers of American pop songs. We quickly learned to connect our phones to the car via Bluetooth and listen to our mp3 collection.
From Mont St.-Michel it’s a pretty short drive to the Normandie coast. It would have been a crime to be this close and not visit the battlefield. We spent half a day there and it was well worth the detour. I can’t really do it justice here so it will get its own diary.
There is a refreshing absence of giant pickup trucks on the roads. The few people that drive pickups prefer smaller models that you probably can’t even get back home. Amazingly enough, work seems to get done over there without everyone driving a vehicle the size of my first apartment.
We spent one night in Rouen, mainly to put us within a half-day’s drive of Paris. Didn’t get to see much of the place but it seemed nice enough.
You won’t see many large, truck-based SUV’s over there either. Somehow they manage to raise children without Chevy Suburbans to haul them to soccer practice. The ubiquitous crossovers are starting to become popular over there, but sedans and wagons are still the majority I would say. I saw so many nice station wagons that you can’t get in the States. Because we can’t have nice things.
You’re not allowed to eat or drink while driving over there. However, they generally have very nice rest stops with food that is actually decent. Hey, it’s France. What did you expect?
The sandwich I got at the rest stop was better than anything I’ve had at Panera. They’re very picky about their food. I had a moment of pride when I completed an entire transaction in French.
(Kicks French language a few times just to make sure it stays down)
Diesel cars are very popular in France, but I believe the French government is trying to discourage them because of pollution. You get used to hearing the clatter of 4-cylinder diesels.
What do the French drive? Of course the French brands seemed pretty popular. You see a lot of Renaults, Peugeots and Citroens.
They also seem to like German cars as VW/Audi and BMW were well represented. I saw a surprising number of Skodas (Czech). We saw lots of Toyotas but not so many Hondas. Very few American cars. I saw a couple of Fords but that was about it.
On average the cars are smaller. The entry level car seemed to be a Renault Clio, which is pretty small. The bread-and-butter car seemed to be a Renault Megane, which I’d say is roughly the size of a VW Golf.
They still like hatchbacks in France, which I still think are pretty practical. You can fit a lot of stuff in a hatchback if you fold the rear seats down.
From Rouen we headed east towards Paris, stopping in the small village of Giverny.
We were in Giverny to visit the home of Claude Monet. Apparently so was every other tourist in France, as it was wall-to-wall people.
I was always told that you can spot an American in Europe because they’re the ones wearing jeans and sneakers. That may have been true at one time, but it seemed to me that the French were all wearing jeans and sneakers and I was the only guy in the whole damn country wearing khakis.
Despite the crowds and the occasional rain shower it was well worth the stop. This would be on my list of places to see again.
From Giverny we headed for Paris and one last stop before turning the car back in. I wanted to see the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget airport. I’ll have to give this one its own diary. Lot of cool French aircraft that you won't see at a US museum.
Fortunately we only had to drive the outskirts of Paris to drop the car off at Charles de Gaulle Airport. My plan was to spend the night at one of the airport hotels and then catch a flight home the next morning.
Amazingly I found the rental car return. Somewhere on the lower level of Terminal 2. I think I remembered it from renting a car here back in 2011.
The airport hotels are served by a shuttle bus that runs every 20 minutes or so. At busy times of day expect to be crammed in there with 100 of your closest friends — and their luggage.
Charles de Gaulle is not a good airport. The only thing I like about it is that it looks like what people in 1965 thought the year 2019 was going to look like. It’s a mess of three terminals, with Terminal 2 being the largest. Some parts of Terminal 2 are only connected by train! Long story short, if you fly out of CDG, give yourself plenty of time.
If you can do without the car, I’d suggest relying on other forms of transportation. Now that I’ve said that, having the car gave us access to places we might not have seen otherwise. Plus we had the adventure of driving around France. It’s your call.
By the way, does anyone know how I could sneak a Renault station wagon into the US? Maybe ship it as a “decorative lawn sculpture?” Glue a Ford badge over the Renault emblem? I want this car dammit!