Saturday 10.2.2010


On the Road in France


This is one of those days you know is coming. Don’t get the wrong impression, it was not horrible by any means, but it was just tedious and off a beat all day long. If this is as bad as it gets on this trip, we should consider ourselves lucky.

John has made arrangements to pick up our car this morning at 8:00 am which requires a phone call from the airport terminal, a quick shuttle, some signing of papers, a brief instruction period, directions and off we go. Pat, our designated navigator, joins him as a second set of eyes and ears, while Mary has volunteered to walk into the village to pick up some fresh pastries for breakfast.

The 7:35 shuttle to the airport shows up right on time and drops Pat and John near the train station in terminal two. We try to find an info booth for the right courtesy phone and help with directions, but of course, they aren’t open on a Saturday morning. After doing some sort of gigantic circle dance around the terminal for about 15 minutes we find a phone and call the car company. The person on the other end doesn’t know anything about the train station and tells us that we must get to one of the real airline terminals and call her back with a specific location. We go to 2-D, gate 4 and call her again and after much discussion on the other end she tells us to go to gate 5 where someone in a blue van will pick us up.

Sure enough the van arrives in about ten minutes and whisks us to the car lot where the young lady immediately asks for John’s passport. We have a ream of paperwork with us and nowhere does it say to bring a passport (it's back in the room). More discussion. They say that if I can email a copy of my passport to them before noon we can have the car, which we readily agree to do. (Strangely, no one asked for a driver’s license.) We get a quick tutorial on the GPS system and confirm that everything is programmed in English, check the windshield wipers (it’s raining) and head for the gas station.

A word about the car.  We are leasing a Peugeot 308 SW hatchback for the rest of the trip.  This is a program sponsored by the EU that allows travelers spending more that 17 days in Europe to purchase a new car and then sell it back to them at the end of the trip.  The result is that you get a brand new car built to your specs for about 50-bucks a day including all insurance coverage.  The cars with low mileage are then sold at a discount back into the European marketplace.

Here we will go into summary mode since the rest of the day went just like it began with a new challenge each and every hour:


The gas pump will take neither John's nor Pat's credit cards, the fellow makes us move to another pump and then pay inside.


Mary, John and Pat each have a couple more things to do that seem to happen sequentially rather than concurrently which results in our leaving after 10:00 am.

The fellow at the desk insists that we can’t take the route on our map but must follow a series of roads not on our map and rattles off his own idea of directions.


We follow his directions, creep through suburban Paris neighborhoods on surface streets and get to the first town outside of the city (Meaux) about noon where we get lost.


Pat has printed Michelin directions that are painful to follow and Mary finally suggests that we pull over and take a shot with the GPS system. Here we meet "Mademoiselle Monique Deneuve" (the English with a French accent voice on the GPS who we have named) who becomes an immediate voice of reason and gets us back on the right road.


We stop at a Baggueri shop for sandwiches and it all goes well. What?


We try to fool Monique and take a short-cut but the exit we want is closed. Recalculate.


We do find a shortcut outside of Toul (after being temporarily lost in heavy traffic) which turns out to be a lovely drive to Epinal where we are stopping at the American WWII Cemetery.

It’s now obvious that we won’t get to our destination B&B until 6:00 and we promised between 4 and 5. John tries to call with six different phone number configurations, but none work. Now our hostess will be cranky.


The sun has come out and the drive from Epinal to Colmar is through river valleys and over mountains with little villages dotting the landscape. This is breathtaking. Monique has promised us a 6:04 arrival at our destination, Chez Leslie in Colmar, and we pull in at 6:05. Not bad.

Our hostess Leslie is not real cranky when we arrive but seems a bit bratty. Just when we decide we shouldn’t like her she reverses course and does something nice. The check-in process takes a half hour with husband Philippe bringing us wine and Leslie making us dinner reservations. She makes them for 7:30 at a typical Alsatian restaurant Chez Honsi and assures us that it is no more than a 15 minute walk.

Pat has a top-bunk-bed in a tiny room with a big flat screen TV, lovely balcony over the garden, shower and sink in the room and a WC in the hall. M&J have a decent sized room and bath. Nice bed, tiny balcony over the street and no TV.


We give ourselves a few extra minutes and leave for dinner at 7:10. At 8:00 we are still wandering the streets of Colmar looking for our restaurant until Mary finally corrals some lady walking her St. Bernard (she has to be a local) to find out that we are about 75-feet away from Chez Honsi. We apologize to our hostess who is quite gracious and gets us seated in a corner. Mary and Pat both have the Riesling Chicken with mushroom-wine gravy and spaetzle and John has the Choucroute Garni (pork products, potatoes and kraut), both local specialties. M&J split a Riesling while Pat sticks to a beer.


We get lost again on our way home, so it is a fitting conclusion to our very long day. We let the resident black cat in with us and hope she is not an omen for tomorrow. The U.S. is considering issuing a warning to all American citizens in Europe that they may be sprayed with bullets by terrorists. That would really be a bad day.


Today’s weather: Cloudy and rain morning, sun and warm afternoon. Low 58, high 68