I previously wrote about my recent vacation in France, and discussed all the places we went and fun things we did. I made a few allusions to parts of the trip that were unpleasant, but I didn't elaborate. I wanted to focus on the enjoyable parts of the trip, and save the unpleasant parts for a follow-up post.
I've previously visited the U.K., Denmark, and Germany, where everyone spoke fluent English, and I never had any problems communicating with anyone. I was a little more worried about the language barrier on this trip, since the French have a bit of a reputation for not liking Americans. I was especially worried about our plans to travel outside of Paris, into more rural parts of the country, where I did not expect English to be as common.
This fear proved almost completely unfounded. Almost everyone in Paris spoke conversational English. In the few instances in which we interacted with non-English-speaking French persons (mostly in the country-side), my partner proved to be surprisingly capable of conversing with them. I had no idea that she spoke French (in addition to Spanish and some Japanese), but apparently, she had been studying French in the months leading up to the trip, and was able to hold conversation well enough.
The only thing worse than an airline seat...
The real misery began before the vacation even properly began, with the trans-Atlantic flight. Airlines seem to be going out of their way to do everything possible to make long flights as miserable as possible. It's like they're all in a race to the bottom. The last few times I flew overseas, it was over British Airlines or Hawaiian Airlines, which were both reasonably comfortable flights. This time, I flew a Delta flight partially operated by Air France, and I've also flown Frontier recently. The 7 1/2 hour flight across the Atlantic to Paris was almost as bad and uncomfortable as a domestic Spirit flight. I had a middle seat, with my knees pressing up against the seat in front of me the whole time, and my elbows scrunched into my sides so as not to be infringing on my neighbors' space.
It's as if plane seats have been scientifically designed to be as uncomfortable as possible for anybody who is of average size or larger.
To make matters worse, as soon as the plane took off from my layover in Detroit, I started developing a migraine. I've suffered from migraines my entire life, and they recently have been getting worse. So I had recently visited a neurologist to talk about my migraines, and he had prescribed me a new migraine medication called Sumatriptan. I had taken the Sumatriptan once prior, and it knocked out the migraine within 30 or 40 minutes, so I was hopeful that it would work again. In fact, I expected that it would work again, and didn't even bother to pack my old go-to medication: Excedrin Migraine.
A small bottle of Excedrin is an essential travel supply.
Well, the Sumatriptan did not work.
The only thing worse than an airline seat, is being stuck in an airline seat with a migraine. I spent the entire 7 1/2 hour flight across the Atlantic crunched in a middle seat, with a migraine, unable to sleep or relax, and unable to read or watch movies. I had even taken my gaming laptop with me, with the expectation of going on a 7-hour Civ bender during the flight. No such luck. I had to just sit there with my eyes closed and my head in my hands, counting down the minutes until the plane landed. Thankfully, once I got out of the airport and metro stations in Paris, and out into fresh air, the migraines started to recede on its own, and I was able to enjoy the rest of the day with just a dull headache.
I've since taken the Sumatriptan again, and it also did not work. So I guess it's back to taking Excedrin Migraine until my doctors can find something else that does work...
In any case, the experience was so miserable that I spent the extra money to choose my own seat for the flight back. I did not want a repeat, especially considering that the flight back was an 11-hour flight that landed in Seattle for a transfer to Vegas. I picked a seat on the aisle in the back row. This would allow me to stretch my feet into the aisle, and being in the back would give me immediate access to the restroom if I needed it (I didn't end up using the restroom during this flight, but you'll understand later in the blog why I wanted this).
I need anxiety medication after driving in French cities
Though the language barrier proved not to be as problematic as I thought, my other major anxiety turned out to be very warranted: driving in France. I usually prefer to take public transit when traveling, so that I don't have to worry about driving in unfamiliar places. I tried to review French driving and traffic laws, but my brief studies did not prepare me for the reality of trying to navigate French roads. The French drive on the right side of the road, but the narrow width of the roads, the frequency of one-way roads, complicated intersections, and un-intuitive roundabouts were very stressful and nerve-racking. I was familiar with the meaning of most European road sign symbols, but there were still plenty of signs that were written in French, and not being able to read road signs that were written in a language I can't read and don't understand, certainly did not help.
OK, we got used to the stop lights. As an American, I'm used to stopping in an intersection with my car blocking half the crosswalk. You can't do that in France. If you do, then the stop light will be behind your car, because the lights are positioned on the side of the road before the crosswalks. These cities are designed more for pedestrians than for cars, so I feel confident in saying that this is done in order to force cars to stop early at intersections so as not to hit pedestrians in the crosswalks. On the first day of driving, I had several instances in which I had to ask my daughter in the back seat to tell me when the light turned green, because I had stopped too late and couldn't see the traffic light anymore. But I got used to it, and started to stop much earlier.
Driving in French cities was very stressful and difficult to navigate.
Despite knowing what the "one-way" and "do not enter" signs looked like, I struggled to find them at intersections. I'm not familiar with the conventions of where French road signs are placed, and they weren't always placed in the places that I'm used to looking for road signs. The French also seem to use white lines to separate the directions of traffic, instead of the yellow lines that are customary in the United States. But sometimes, there would be solid white lines, and sometimes there would be broken white lines, but traffic would be going in both directions, or just in one direction, regardless. This created a lot of hesitancy in whether I could turn onto certain streets or not. Even with the navigation system telling us to go certain directions, I would still hesitate, and worry if I was supposed to be allowed to go that way.
Worse yet, the roads and intersections could be ridiculously complicated. There are intersections in Paris that lead directly into other intersections, and roundabouts inside of other roundabouts. And roundabouts with 7 to 12 roads going off of them -- some of which are one-way. There were roundabouts with stop lights inside of them! If not for being able to follow the cards in front of me, I honestly would not have known where I was supposed to go.
In one case, the car's navigation system wanted me to turn onto a street that seemed to have a "no entry" sign on it. I panicked and turned the other way, which resulted in me driving [possibly the wrong way] onto a red [possibly one-way] bus-only road. I had busses passing me and honking, but once on the road, it was hard to get off. The intersecting roads all had bollards, presumably for the purposes of blocking traffic from entering the bus-only road. But on the other side of the coin, those bollards also stop cars that accidentally wander onto the road from being able to exit that road in a timely fashion. I basically had to drive the entire length of that road until I could finally exit the other end. It was incredibly embarrassing, and stressful. I would not be surprised if we ended up on the local nightly news: "Stupid American tourist terrorizes town by driving through clearly-marked bus lane".
A similar incident happened when I was trying to drive to a castle. The navigation literally took me to the front door of the ticket office, which happened to be across the bridge over the old moat, into the castle grounds, and onto a pedestrian courtyard full of school children. I think this road was open to vehicles, because I saw other cars use it, but I think it was only supposed to be for workers at the castle.
After this incident, and a couple other incidents of struggling to find parking lots or garages, we got into the habit of specifically looking for public parking, and telling the navigation to take us there (instead of to the site we actually wanted to visit).
Image from Google Maps street view
There are lights inside the intersection! Who are these lights for?
Am I supposed to stop in the middle of the intersection because one of these lights is red?
The drive back into Paris was the worst. We were coming into the city during rush hour, and had problems with setting up the navigation to take us to the rental car drop-off. It was so bad that when I finally parked the car in the rental drop-off garage, I got out, keeled over, and almost threw up. I was that tense and nervous.
Driving in French cities is not an experience that I ever want to repeat.
Highways flow smoothly
Although the cities and towns were difficult to drive in, the highways were a pleasure to drive. French law requires that any car in the left lane actually be passing. Unlike American drivers, French drivers in the right lane were actually pretty good at going the speed limit or faster. I could actually set the cruise control to 130 km/h and stay in the right lane, switching to the passing lane only when coming up on a slower-moving lorry.
There were a couple other elements of French highways design that I wish would be implemented in the States. For one thing, the left and right lanes would be separated by a solid "no passing" line leading up to, and for a short while after, any on or off ramp. This discourages drivers from cutting across lanes to make sudden exits, or from entering straight into the passing lane, or even from making lane changes around where cars are entering or exiting the highway -- all of which are common things for American drivers to do. The French road marking make it clear that you are not supposed to do these things! American roads make no such effort to control lane changes, which leads to a lot of tense merging situations with cars merging across each other's faces into and out of the right lane, which slows down traffic and occasionally leads to wrecks.
French highways were really easy to drive and flowed smoothly.
Even though the French highways are narrow (the entire highways was about the width of the American suburban road in front of my house), I never felt uncomfortable or stressed because of how smoothly everything flowed, and how well signed and marked everything was.
Revenge of the shrimp
It also wouldn't be a family trip without one of us getting sick. In this case, I had digestive distress for pretty much the entire time in the French countryside. I believe this was the result of some bad shrimp that I had on the Siene River dinner cruise our last night in Paris. In addition to being a tour of French cultural sites and D-Day bunkers, this trip also (for me) turned into a tour of French toilets.
As such, I noticed an annoying trend with smaller French cities and rural areas. That is that most public toilets in such areas lacked toilet seats. They weren't, like, holes in the ground that you squat over, like one might find in many East Asian countries. I've read that squatting lower to the ground like that might actually be healthier. But that wasn't even the case here. The toilets were regular, knee-high porcelain bowls, just like what you would find in any American restroom, except that they wouldn't have a seat on top of them. So it's all the ickiness and inconvenience of not having a proper seat, without any of the presumed health benefits of squatting lower to the ground like an east Asian toilet. Seems like the worst of both worlds to me.
Public toilets in many parts of France lacked seats.
This required squatting and hovering over the toilet bowl for bowel movements, instead of sitting on the toilet. My advice: do some squats and leg presses before going on a trip to rural France! Without practice, it was challenging -- especially since I've gained a lot of weight in the past few years, and my lower body strength hasn't quite kept up with all that added weight. The fact that I wasn't feeling well, and that it was a hot and humid day, meant that I was also weak and low-energy, which only exacerbated the problem.
I don't want to provide too much information about my experience with these French public toilets. But needless to say, I'm not very practiced at performing a "Turkish squat", and my accuracy left a lot to be desired. I did clean up after myself as best I could! I didn't want to be a completely disrespectful American tourist. But I still feel bad for anybody who might have had to use that toilet after me.
What sucks is that I really like the way that European toilets have 2 flushing mechanism: a small flush (for flushing down pee), and a big flush (for flushing a bowel movement). This is another European practice that I really wish would be adopted in the United States, especially here in the Pacific Southwest, where water is a scarce resource. Being able to choose to do small flushes would go a long way towards cutting back on water consumption. But if given the choice, I think I would prefer to keep my toilet seats, thank you very much.
A great trip, nonetheless
Miserable plane flight, stressful drives, and shitty toilets aside, the trip was still a wonderful experience. I tried to make the best of things, even though I was feeling sick for half the trip. That illness didn't stop me from going out and doing the things that we had planned to do. Even though I did loose a lot of time to toilet breaks, every day was full of activity and new sights and new experiences. We drove halfway across France in like half a day, which emphasizes just how small Europe is compared to the United States. Driving cross country in France is comparable to driving to coastal California or to Utah (from our home in Las Vegas) -- though with a lot more medieval castles.
If I ever go back to France, I think I'll skip the rental car and stick with public transit. And hopefully, I'll actually get to go inside of Notre Dame next time...
That? Oh that's just a medieval castle on the side of the highway. No big deal...