Thank God I learned to drive standard

We rented a car on Saturday; I knew automatic transmissions weren't that popular in Europe, but in hindsight, we really could have benefitted from spending the extra cash to get one. Everyone tells you to set up your rental before you visit the shop, and they're right; in fact, you can even do it over the internet in-country a couple of days before, with signifcant savings.

To recap; Amy and I wanted to do a tour of the Loire valley, to visit ancient castles and vineyards. It has a fairly low population, and trains do go out that way, but after looking at schedules and the cost of single tickets or train passes, it was looking like a car plus gas was going to cost only a little bit more, and give us a tonne more flexibility. And, if worse were to come to worst, we'd have a place to crash and store our stuff.

Before telling you more about the car, I have to make a brief digression about our stuff. It seems to have found a way to take on a larger appearance in comparison to how it looked when we originally packed it. Everything fit, it must have; I mean, it came over on the plane with us (without even a second glance by the airline in terms of carry-on size or restrictions). But every morning when we put it back together, it seems like an impossible task to fit it all in the bags, but somehow, everything fits and doesn't seem to weigh too much. I'll praise highly Mountain Equipment Co-op for making these wonder bags, and compression sacks for being a whole lot more useful than I originally thought they'd be. For clothes: same weight, a third the size.

So, back to the car. We made plans to drive out to see a mutal friend, Erik and his wife Laure, at their house in Chaumont-en-Vexin. After hitting McDonald's for the third time in as many days to get some hyper-accurate dimensions on Google Maps, we went over to EuropeCar to pick up our reserved vehicle. After many furrowed brows and head scratchings, the store manager Ernest managed to find the reservation, but only after I showed him the invoice provided to me by email - twice - on the screen of the laptop. And then it turned out they didn't have the car we'd wanted, so he just gave us a bigger one.

The car in question is a Renault Scenic - it may look small, but like the packs, it's an illusion. It could fit five people and their luggage, takes diesel and turns on a dime. It's also a manual transmission, but has a bunch of dummy-safe features to stop you from messing up to badly at shifting gears. Here's the neater thing - no key. You use a plastic card the size of about a playing card. You just fit it into a slot and push a button to start or stop the engine. I spent about five minutes wowwing about that, and thought that all European cars worked like that for the next day.

All of my experience in driving manual transmission cars was learned on my parent's vehicles, Nissan Stanzas, when I was around sixteen. The nightmare scenario (at least, to me) for standard is a stop on an incline. You have to get your foot off the brake and onto the gas, and avoid stalling the car, without crunching the car behind you. But after stalling about four times in a row with my Dad one afternoon, I decided to practice on the forty-five degree driveway until I was really comfortable with the technique that lets you essentially keep the car stationary at that angle without even touching the brake. I inched backwards and forwards on that little mound for close to forty-five minutes before steam started coming out the hood. I took that to mean that I'd probably practiced enough.

So, back to Paris. With Amy navigating, we grabbed our stuff from the hostel and set out to leave Paris via the north, hit some country roads and show up at Erik and Laure's with confident smiles on our faces. It turned out slightly differently.

Our first real challenge was the Péripherique, a beltway surrounding the interior of the city. Our directions were easy enough - it turns out it's the roads that were the problem. Approaching the intersection, there was a Péripherique intérior, and a Péripherique extérior. Guess which one we chose? That's right, the wrong one. It's the same road, it's just one goes counterclockwise and the other goes clockwise, but we didn't know that at the time. At any rate, it took us straight into a traffic mess, but Amy quickly navigated us around and back into the other direction. Eventually, we made it out of the heart of Paris, our hearts pumping. There's nothing quite like driving an unfamiliar vehicle in an unfamiliar city with directions that appear to make sense but only give you a trace of certainty, to make you feel alive. Freaked out, but alive.

And then there were the roundabouts (a.k.a. traffic circles). It really is a good alternative to traffic lights, but it does take some getting used to. Essentially, three or more (sometimes, many more) roads converge on a circular section of road. The island in the middle is usually built up with ground, trees, plants, buildings, castles, you name it, all of which is (I assume) designed to improve your mental telepathy to figure out if anyone is on the other side of it. You come up to a yield sign adorned with two helpful signs: "Cedez passage", and "Vous n'avez pas le priorité" - meaning, if someone's coming around, let them pass and merge when the way is clear. Since you can't see around the corner of the circle, it forces you to slow down and make a snap decision to stop at the last minute when someone barrels around. As you're rounding the circle, you have to master the art of looking in two different directions with your eyes. You look to your left with your left eye to see the signpost telling you if you need to get off the roundabout, and to your right with your right eye to see if there's a car in your blind spot for when you have to get off. With your third eye, you make sure a car hasn't stopped dead in front of you. It takes some getting used to.

The last bit of French driving etiquette is the absolute priority of the right. Unless there's a sign, if you're on the right side of a car coming towards you, you have the priority to go ahead, and if you are to the left of a car, they have priority. This only got me once: we were coming to a three-way intersection coming in at the weirdest angles I've ever seen, with no lights. Some cars were coming towards me on my left; I couldn't tell if they were going to stop, so I slowed down, which prompted them to wave at me to go, the guys behind me to honk their horns, and then the guys on my left started honking to. So I punched on, and stalled the car in the process. In starting the car (remember, I'm looking for a key to turn at this point, not a button to push) I turned on the radio, the air conditioning, the wipers, and the wrong signal light. Eventually things turned on again and the car launched forward like a rocket. Vive la France!

Luckily, I think if you can drive around and out of Paris, you can pretty much handle anything the French roads throw at you. It got a whole lot easier once we got onto the regional roads and could just drive in a straight line for a while. It was only once we had to make some road changes that we started get messed up by the French signage, which is arbitrary and capricious. The signs are helpfully placed on the sides of buildings, but of course, in the most necessary of cases, the signs were carefully hidden behind trees, advertising, or, other signs. Such was the case when at the end of our journey, we were driving up and down looking for the street on which we could find the house of Erik and Laure, only to be told that it was in fact the street we were driving on. When we went back to the car, we found it to be parked practically across the street from their house. Go figure.

Our experience with Paris was filled with the largesse of France's national capital, but it left us overwhelmed a bit exhausted. Everything is just so big, so historic, so majestic. To live there must be to develop a set of blinders to the fantasy that surrounds; otherwise, how would you get anything done? By contrast, our visit with Erik and Laure was intimate and personal. Looking at the buildings of France, you see some imposing facades of buildings, huge doors with brass handles in the centre, and you never know what's on the other side. Visiting Erik and Laure was an experience behind these doors, as what existed there was a marvellous country estate with not one but two garden areas. We ate well, talked all about France and Canada, shared photos and music, and slept the sleep of weary travellers.

And then we went on to the Loire valley...