On the Road with Garmina and Tom

All right, all right.  Time to stop being so hard on the French. 

Ken and I love to drive.  We both grew up in Ohio, and taking long (usually painful) and always memorable cross-country trips was a part of both of our childhoods.  My family would go to the East Coast, Florida, upper Michigan and the desert southwest.  Ken’s would go through various and boring and humid parts of fly-over country (That’s right, I said it – boring and humid.) to visit relatives as they made their way to other relatives’ houses up and down the state of California.  We both traveled in wood paneled station wagons that have air, conditioning, though “it can’t be used for fear of over-heating in the middle of the desert.”  As soon as I turned 16, I started to drive these trips on my own, with my 12 year old little brother by my side.  Once Ken and I were together as a couple, we would drive hours and hours just to get away from things.  Going nowhere or somewhere, it didn’t matter.  (Now of course we can do that on the computer – oh, life before the Internet, our children will never understand you.)

I wax nostalgic.  Back to today.  We decided to take a week to drive through the heart of France, so that we could get a feel for the size and sights of the countryside.  A way for us to intuitively measure and compare it to all the miles we have covered across the U.S. in our lives.  This boggled the brain of every French person we met.  Every time, they would screw up their faces and check to see if they heard us right…  “You drove six hours?  In one day?”  No French would do such a thing.  You couldn’t possibly enjoy a two-hour lunch and a two-hour dinner and also drive six hours in a day and still be beautiful– quelle horreur!

We brought a Garmin GPS loaded with Europe’s highways and byways with us.  (We use the female British voice-over to warm us up for our London tour.)  Then we found that the Scenic came equipped with a Tom-Tom GPS, and as they didn’t include the Snoop-Dog voice over, we decide to use the male British voice, named Tom, of course.  We placed the two side by side to see if they could agree and disagree in a polite, but not forceful, British way.  They did.  Garmina prefers to take us on country roads, while Tom is all about the quickest route.  We were able to use each to our advantage on various days.  (We have decided that when we get home we should buy another pair of finches to join Gloria and Melman, and their names will be Garmina and Tom.)

This is Gloria in front and Melman in back.

So, as the kilometers pass under the wheels of our voiture, I can feel my frustrations with Paris leave me.  We breezed out of Paris much easier than we had dared hope, and headed out to Lyon, then into the Provence area. 

As we went, the various toll roads lightened our pockets by about 40 euro.  It ain’t cheap to drive in France, and you can understand why some people never bother to use anything other than the friggin’ amazing European train system (more on that later.)  Our diesel car sipped its fuel sparingly.  Diesel, or gazol, is the cheapest gasoline at 1.45 euro per litre.  Which works out to like, $8 per gallon.  And all that extra money is in taxes, folks, it’s not going to the oil-producing nations. 

There are some things that the French have absolutely right.