Tuesday October 25, drive to Paris, France

After a quick breakfast in the hotel's dining room the next morning, we started driving the final stretch to Paris. We alternated stretches of tollway driving with stretches of 2-lane highways that wandered through the towns and villages. It was a nice way of seeing, as Christoph had recommended, "France as it once was." Driving on the 2-lane roads was, of course, a lot slower than the limited access toll road, but we really did see a lot more of France that way. In fact, for the 2-lane roads the speed limit between towns was 90 kilometers per hour but that reduced to 70 or even 50 kph in the towns. Driving that slowly really was an advantage, especially for me as a driver, because I could actually look at the scenery while we were stopped or when we were creeping along through a town.

I was impressed with how even the more modest French homes in these rural towns were often quite picturesque. First of all, the owners had often made an effort to make their houses distinct with some fancy brickwork or unusual window outlines or painted shutters. But on top of that, the effects of age had often weathered the facades in such a way as to make them more interesting, somewhat in the same manner that the lines on an older person's face typically make them much more interesting than the fresh, unlined faces of young people (sorry kids!). In many of the houses the outside layer of stucco had come off in patches, revealing the underlying stonework of the walls. On other houses ivy or other vines had climbed over parts of the exterior walls, and since it was fall and the leaves were turning red and yellow, that added colorful accents.

Now I'm not saying that these were fancy houses in any sense; the chateaux we saw occasionally perched on the hillsides were more like that. But nevertheless I had the feeling that in some of those small towns you would have about one quarter to one third of the houses that would really be worth photographing and putting in a calendar or something, and that is a remarkably high percentage. I expect that if those old houses could talk they would also have many interesting stories to tell, but we were passing by too quickly to stop and chat with the owners.

As we neared Paris on a toll road, we were getting mighty hungry and so pulled off in a rest area that offered food. Unfortunately, the food turned out to be a McDonalds restaurant and we just couldn't face that again so soon. However, the rest area also had a Spar food store in it and it turned out that they carried a wide variety of ready-made sandwiches. We both had baguette sandwiches, mine featuring turkey ("dinde") and "crudités" (apparently referring to some vegetables added to it), and Monika stuck to the safe option of a ham and cheese sandwich. The sandwiches cost much less being purchased at Spar (3 Euro) than if we had eaten the same thing in a restaurant, and that way we could finish up the liter bottle of Coca Cola that we had purchased earlier.

The rest areas along the French toll roads varied in amenities from hole-in-the-floor pit toilets to large complexes with gas stations, grocery stores, variety shops, family amusements, and even museums. In a rest area just outside of Nice we found an antique car museum and in a rest area south of Paris we found some kind of archeological-historical museum that was, unfortunately, closed. However, some fancy water fountains kept us entertained.

For any of you who may drive in France, be forewarned that when you have a rest area offering nothing but toilets and maybe a picnic area, those toilets are apt to be the hole-in-the-ground types that take some getting used to. Curiously enough, even at those basic rest areas the handicapped toilets would be real flush models, albeit with no toilet seats. So if you do have to visit a low-amenities rest area, walk with a limp, head for the handicapped toilet, and, if feasible, bring your own portable toilet seat, which, unless you purchase it from the U.S. Air Force, will cost you considerably less than $500.

However, one other way of finding a toilet while driving on the toll roads is to simply take the next exit. All the exits we drove through had bathrooms right beyond the tollgates. Now legally I expect you would have to exit, use the facilities, and then re-enter to continue on your merry way. However, at some exits it might be possible to stop and park short of the toll gate, make a mad dash on foot for the toilets, and then run back to the car to make a U-turn and get back on the expressway. But for heaven's sake don't do that at a toll both where they have armed guards! You would run the risk that the guards would get excited, and the last thing you want to do is excite an armed guard. Even as it was, we were eyed suspiciously by groups of gendarmes when getting on and off the toll way at several exits. I really don't know if it was something about me, something about Monika, or something about the car that excited the police so, but it was distinctly unnerving to be stared at by three or four armed officers as we pulled into the tollgates.

After the toll road ended, we worked our way around the eastern edge of Paris to Charles De Gaulle airport and checked in with Air France to see if they could change our return flight to the next day. They charged us a hefty $400 penalty, and if I had been thinking straight I would have kept our original tickets and just spent the next few days bumming around Paris. But we were tired and wanted to go home, so we got our new E-tickets and drove back outside the airport to an Ibis hotel at a nearby conference center. We did that because the conference center Ibis hotel charged 49 Euro per night, compared to the apparently identical Ibis hotel on the airport that charged 98 Euro per night! After checking in and dragging all our bags upstairs (but with an elevator this time-1 star at least!), Monika repacked for the trip back while I updated the journal. Then we each took showers, tried to finish off the last of our groceries for dinner, and relaxed for the evening. Bedtime was early in preparation for getting up at 6:30 a.m. for the 15 minute drive to the airport the next morning.