May 9, 2008

Hi guys! Well today we travelled from Brive to Carcassonne. We are getting closer to the Riviera but you wouldn't know it from the weather. It was very cool and cloudy all day. We got here at about 1:30 in the afternoon and tried to check in at our hotel to be informed told that we couldn't do that until after 5PM. In France they don't seem to do anything between 2-5 PM. Well when in France do what the French do. It is very difficult getting used to the laid back way of life.

We had a real experience driving today and I am going to let Bob share his thoughts personally. We came over the Pyrennes to get to Carcassonne and what an experience. First of all, I missed a turn that blondie asked me to make. Sometimes it's really hard to understand what is a road and what is a driveway. Anyway, she rerouted me by again making a sharp turn into a gap in a fence across a set of railway tracks. Then about 5 km down the road, she says keep right, and I was sure this was a driveway, as I had never been asked to go onto a gravel road. Sure enough, it curved up onto the mountain, so I figured I'd made a mistake, and made a U-turn. I went back down and thought I'd drive a bit farther down the road and hope to find the correct turn.

No such luck, I was told to return and go up that same road, so I went a little farther up the hill, and ended up in the yard of an abandoned farm. It's quite possible that the track would eventually have ended up going somewhere, but I was unwilling to take the rental car any further. I thought I'd return to where I made my earlier error, and try again, but she picked up on it right away, and directed me along another route (track, but paved this time) to bisect the road I should have taken earlier.

We now started heading up the mountain, on a quite nice road, with a white line down the middle, so it was a "real" road. We must have travelled for about 25 km UP, almost straight up, with multiple switchbacks as you can see from the GPS that Jan took a picture of to verify where we were. We met a loaded logging truck coming down at one point, and I had visions of it pushing me off the road, it was so narrow. There is virtually no shoulder on the roads over here. As we didn't meet anyone else for the longest time, actually until after I started heading back down, I was worried that if I slipped off the road, we'd disappear, and no one would know where we were. LOL



Finally we started heading down, and now the white line disappeared, and there were numerous piles of decked logs on the sides of the road! Where the heck are we??? All this time it has been pouring rain. We tried taking pictures but we were in the clouds and not very conducive to a clear shot. At one point I was fiddling with the windshield wiper switch, and must have accidentally hit a button, on the stalk, as sometime later I noticed an odd warning picture on the dash, and some German warning. I thought something was wrong with the car, and we're miles from the nearest Renault dealer!

I thought maybe the warning was telling me that my rear window washer tank was out of fluid, or that there was a problem with the fuel, but the gas gauge showed 3/4 of a tank. The car was still performing as well as ever, so I kept on driving, hoping we'd make it to a dealer sometime soon. Eventually we had to turn on to a specific freeway in order to find our hotel, but the road we were on did not have an entrance ramp to it. We tried a number of different roads, that looked likely, but no success. At one point, after blondie tried to take me onto another gravel road that happened to be alongside the freeway, I decided enough was enough. I pulled into some business parking lot, and went in to ask someone for directions. (me, a man??? unheard of!) With my limited comprehension of French and their virtually non-existent understanding of English, I found a guy who drew up a small map for me, which I was able to follow, right to the hotel, just in time to find out they were closed for another 3 hours. (siesta, I guess).

We searched the GPS for the nearest Renault dealer, and after confusing her again, when we came to a road closed for construction, 1 block from our destination, we finally arrived at the dealer. Of course they didn't speak English, or German, so we had an interesting time trying to tell them our problem with the car. One guy suggested that they reprogram the dash warnings to come up in English, which seemed perfectly sensible to me, but then another guy reached into the car, and touched something on the steering wheel, and voila! the warning went away! I asked him dumbfounded what he'd done, and he managed to explain, in French mind you, what he'd done, and I actually understood. I guess while coming down the mountain, as I was trying to maneuver around the corners, and play with my windshield wipers, I inadvertently touched a button that worked the computer on the car, so it simply switched the display to show me the fuel consumption km/l. As soon as he touched the button again, it reverted back to the readout I was familiar with. I drove all week not realizing that the car even had a computer. Too bad they didn't explain the workings of the car completely to me when I picked it up in Germany.

Oh, and while I was attempting to explain my problem to the dealer, I told them I picked the car up in Germany, was driving around Europe, and returning it to Germany. They advised me I couldn't do that! I said what do you mean? I've been doing it for a week. I guess his understanding of English wasn't as good as he thought it was.

So we're here for a night and then on to Nimes for two. This hotel that we're trying is really roughing it, The bathroom looks like a porta pottie stuck in a corner, there's no rug on the floor, and the bed is a metal frame, sort of like the ones I used while in the armed forces years ago. But the price is half of what we've been paying for the past week. And they have free wireless internet. Oh well, what's the big deal about a rug anyway?