Driving in the City of Lights

We definitely could have stayed in Scotland a few more days, but, the car needed to be returned and our flights have already been booked. We packed our bags fairly quickly and have a light bag of souvenirs to take with us. We’re hoping that our drive in France will be good, although we are expecting a bit of stress having to drive on the other side of the road and all. Up and away we go. Farewell beautiful Scotland. We will miss you.

We touched down from our short one hour flight to Paris at 1pm and despite reading that the Parisian public transport system is very good, we bypassed the train and headed straight to the Hire Car area. Oh Ladies, check out the artwork in the airport toilet. What a way to be welcomed to Paris!

Airport Female Toilet - very French indeed

Back to hire care, we already have a car booked for the 16^th for our drive down to Rome so decided that we would brave the traffic and just use the car until then to get around. It sounds cool: “We’re driving the streets of Paris”, but it was far from cool. The price for the 6 day hire car from Paris down to Rome with our 3 days was well over 1,000 euro. It didn’t make sense to us because we’ve already paid for the 3 days but we were told we would have to pay 500 euro because we were returning it in a different country. Anyway, we just wanted to leave the airport so we took the car.

We drove around the car park a couple of times as it took Ev a while to be comfortable being in the other side of the car with gears on the right side, and she flicked the windscreen wipers by accident thinking it was the indicator, Oops! We slowly left the airport with taxi’s (yes, multiple taxi’s) beeping at us to go faster, but hey, we’re learners here. It was amazing to be driving out of the airport and seeing a plane land literally right next to us with only a fence between our road and the plane runway. Crazy!!

Ev driving on the Paris Highway on the other side of the car and road!!

French graffiti

Planes landing next to the car highway

Unfortunately, actually thankfully, we were driving in peak hour traffic because we could actually drive slow and know where we were on the map. We’ve decided not to use Dan’s iPhone for directions any more. If we get lost, we’ll just have to find a way back the old fashioned way with a compass and a map. We saw signs for an exit we should have taken, but somehow, it merged into the road we were actually on. Few! The huge no-lined roundabout was chaos, so we drove extra, extra slow on the outer most section of the road to make sure we got off at the correct street. We were really lucky to get to the hotel in less than 2 hours, and it should have only taken 45 minutes. It was ridiculous, and that train sure sounded like a good idea. That’s enough driving for now. So where do we park the car? Of course there is no car park at the hotel! We dropped our luggage off at the Grand Hotel and drove 5 blocks away through the crazy roundabout again and paid 22 euro for the car to sleep safely. At least we have a car for some day trips though, right? Now we can relax.

After our luxurious Scottish hotel we were in the mood for a nice bath and hoping for a big room. It was comparatively small and quite cramped with a double bed and not a lot of room to move and only a shower, but it was nice, so we happily unpacked our bags and Ev displayed our toy Highlander cow to make the place a little more homey, then we rested for most of the afternoon. At about 5pm we ventured to the streets of Paris looking for dinner and found a nice take-out eatery which we came back to after going to a small supermarket to buy water and fruit. Dinner was very nice. Ev asked reception from some hot water for a cup of tea. It’s a little uncomfortable not having a kettle in the room. Time for sleep now.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan-ev/collections/72157624677997272