October 1 – Back In Paris

What a day of incredible frustration as we concluded our tour of Normandy and have headed back to Paris.

It started out when we left Mont St. Michel.  The causeway was closed for repairs, so we had to walk for about thirty minutes with our baggage to get to the shuttle bus that would take us to the parking lot.  When we got into the car, the GPS took us the wrong way out of the village.  It tried to take us on an access controlled road for which we didn’t have the proper pass.  It was another waste of time, which is important as we have to return the car to Rouen by late afternoon.

Camembert

On our trip back to Rouen, we wanted to stop in Camembert to taste some of their world famous cheese.  The GPS took us down narrow country cow paths, instead of highways or major roads.  That route although scenic wasted even more of our time and was very dangerous.  By the time we got to the cheese factory it was closed for lunch and would not open again for another two hours.

I must admit we did get see the famous Normandy Hedgerows.  These tall and thick hedges are used to delineate farmer’s fields.They became famous in the Battle to Liberate France in the Second World War because they became the largest natural obstacle in the way of the advancing Allied troops.

We also passed through the town of Falise, which is the home of William the Conqueror.  He was the Norman king who ruled England and is famous for the first English census. 

When we left for Rouen, the GPS tried to send us down more country lanes but we decided to try the main road, which eventual got us to the main highway to Rouen.  In Rouen we were directed down bus only lanes, told to turn left where there was no road and told to turn right when all that was required was to enter a roundabout straight ahead and take the left most exit to the car rental lot.

No words, at least words that can be used in a family oriented blog, can begin to describe how much I hate this GPS.

Saying goodbye to the car

We've been renting a Peugeot 3008 diesel Hybrid.  On the positive side it handles nicely and corners very well through all the roundabouts.  But it does not accelerate very quickly, which can be very dangerous when the speed limit on the highways is 130 km/hr.  Also the gas mileage is not what I would have expected from a hybrid.

When we got to Paris, we took a cab ride from the train station to our hotel.  It was absolute chaos with multiple near misses, traffic in which with no one follows any normal rules of the road and intersections completed blocked up with gridlock. Despite all this mayham, there never seems to be any accidents.  I guess when you drive in this pandemonium all the time, it just becomes normal and you adjust your driving accordingly, 

We booked into our hotel, Hotel Residence Des Halles, only to find out that their internet doesn't work.  It keeps asking me for an account and password, which no one on the front desk seems to know anything about.  I tried both WiFi and Ethernet and still get the same response.  I know it is the account and password from their ISP but they won’t listen to me.  I tried connecting at another site and everything is fine there.  This is especially disappointing as we were looking forward to Skyping our grandson Cooper on his 8^th birthday today.

Later I was able to discover that the hotel is using a very old security system called “WEP” and I had to manually configure the network connection for it to work in Windows 8.  I don’t think “WEP” based networks have been popular for about a dozen years and they are really very prone to hacking.

It seems our first River Cruise couple, John and Ellen from Australia, arrived yesterday via Athens. We’ll be having dinner with them tomorrow.  The other couples are leaving Canada tomorrow evening and should be arriving Saturday morning.

Tonight we ate at the “Amazonia” restaurant.  It is a student oriented restaurant as it is closed to the Sorbonne.  It had good food but nothing memorable.