The next morning, I headed off to the car park to bring the car back to the B&B in order to load up our suitcases. On the way back, I took a wrong turn so took a tour of the city as I tried to get back on track. The 2 minute trip took 10 minutes and I was just pulling up onto the sidewalk in front of the B&B as our friends were calling me to find out what had happened.
Our host in Chartres had convinced John that the non-toll route was more direct and would allow us to better enjoy the views of the country-side. Of course I wasn’t going to be watching the countryside. I was going to have my eyes glued to the road, especially the roundabouts and the speed limits which seemed to change every few minutes. To make it more interesting, the French have come up with an imaginative approach to “traffic calming” besides speed bumps. They add protrusions on both side of the road so sections of the two-way road become one-way and the car in the non-preferred direction (red arrow) has to yield to the car in the preferred direction (white arrow). This slows the traffic down, assuming your car doesn’t hit one of the protrusions and take out the lower side of your car or the oncoming car didn’t read the sign properly and you have a slo-mo head on collision in the “calming” zone. Basically these zones may be calming for the residents in the area but are not at all calming for the drivers who have to deal with them.
Our car was ahead on the trip to Amboise and up until the town of Chateaudun (not quite the half way point), we could see our friends John and Nancy in the rear view mirror. As we were pulling out of the other end of Chateaudun we got a phone call from Nancy. They had had an accident. Nancy, who was their navigator, had been feeling sleepy and suggested they stop to get her a Coca Cola at the McDonalds that she had seen up ahead. They had tried 3 different routes to get to the McDonalds (about 300 meters away) and had failed each time so John took a more direct route which involved crossing two lanes of traffic. Unfortunately John didn’t see a large freight truck that was in a blind spot; it side-swiped them, demolishing the front end of their car. Luckily no-one was hurt.
They described their location as being close to a place where their was a Burger King and a McDonalds. I had no trouble locating it on google maps – close to where we had entered Chateaudun. I aimed google at the Burger King and when we arrived at the Burger King parking lot, I gave them a call to get a more accurate location.
But then I was having difficulty getting out of the Burger King parking lot which was shared by some other businesses. On the one side of the parking lot was the way I had come in and on the other side of the parking lot was another one-way also going in the same direction – two ways in and no apparent way out with no signage indicating how to exit. Were the French road engineers so used to the maze-like structures that they had to create in their ancient towns that they were now creating similar structures in new developments? I wonder. Eventually we happened to see some cars going in the opposite direction off in the distance and found our way out.
A few kilometres further down the road, we could see our friends standing beside their car along with some motorcycle police. John had been trying to call the number on his Avis contract but no-one was answering the phones. The police made up an accident report with John and the truck driver present and they also called a tow truck. We packed all the suitcases into our car and John went with the tow truck driver while the rest of us followed in our car. John had by then discovered that there was an Avis office in the town of Blois so I drove us all to Blois where Avis provided another car for Nancy and John. By the time we arrived at our B&B in Amboise it was close to 6 pm; a 2 hour drive had taken 8 hours.
John was so frazzled from the accident that he had forgotten that the B&B included parking. When we phoned them we found that he had parked the car in a public car park and they were dragging their suitcases to the B&B in the rain.
The entrance to the parking lot of the B&B was on a corner of two one-way streets. You can drive right in – slowly – because their is barely room for a car to enter. The problem comes when you want to exit because no car other than maybe something the size of a smart car has the turning radius that allows the car to exit onto one of two streets going in the correct direction. What you have to do is exit going the wrong way on one of the one-way streets, then back up over the other one way street and finally turn to get going in the correct direction. This requires the passenger to act as a traffic police person (police woman in my case) and get back in the car while cars in both directions are getting backed up and their drivers are getting annoyed. Fun for all – really.
We had to do that twice – once to tour a couple of Chateaus and the following day to head to the airport.
The day before leaving we got the notice to check in with Air France. That’s when we discovered that they had cancelled our flight and put us on a different flight leaving two hours earlier (no previous notice given). This meant leaving at 7 am instead of 9 am to drive to the airport.
I looked up gas stations close to the airport and homed in on a “Total Energies” station close to the entrance. That’s when we discovered something else that was interesting. Apparently someone (probably google) just cuts and pastes a photo of one Total Energies station and uses the same photo for in Total Energies stations. When we got to the Total Energies station it didn’t look anything like the photo. In fact, it didn’t even dispense gas. It was an EV charging station.
Finally we did get to another gas station nearby, gassed up and headed in to the car rental area and parked the car close to where we had picked it up – no attendant to be found. Another first – you return the car and there is no-one there. We had to seek one out. But we made it and I am now writing this from our apartment in Nice with pretty much everything within walking distance.
WR Foster 