"A less than stable relationship wouldn't have survived it" - comment from woman next to me on London-Baltimore flight as I described my experiences on the road in France.
If you are an experienced driver in France and like it (or even "love" it) then this page isn't for you, it's for those who haven't driven in France yet and out of reckless self-abuse are thinking about trying it and might want to be spared some aggravation. If you read the Week 2 Peugeot and the disappearing reverse gear episode, you have heard about their toll booths and rental cars. But here is some additional "what you can expect" if you want to brave it. This is one of those series of memories that you have to really rattle again from a few weeks gone to make sure you can say a doubtless "Yes" to the question "was it really that bad?!" Things you should seriously pack with you:
1 ton of patience (for you)
1 ton of patience (for partner)
An extra 1/2 ton of patience and/or forbearance for good measure
If you cannot pack these along and dip into them frequently, or are already "sparky" traveling partners, your new-to-France driving trip will be a misery, count on it. The overriding word that sticks in my mind about the time driving in France, as an American, is "aggravating", period. The only time I felt anything I could nearly call relaxed when driving was on the big "A" highways (notice I do not say "freeways"), but even that was never for long. The general constant aggravations:
1- There is nowhere to pull over.
Again, I have to keep recalling to refresh myself on this fact, and it was a major one. They just don't seem to believe in it. Aside from the centuries old streets in the little towns that have had to morph themselves into the new fast-big-car model where no road widening is possible, even the newer roads that look like they could have been widened aren't. Even on the newer "A" highways I was shocked to see what they consider a "shoulder" which, measured against the average width of a newer sedan, not to mention an SUV-type vehicle, is only about two-thirds the width of the vehicle. That is, stopping on one of these shoulders, which were usually against a guardrail, would always leave your taillight about 1/3 in the road. Simply deadly. I just couldn't believe this approach to road design and I drove about 900km's of these and never saw it vary. So to find a place to pull over and get your bearings, or take a drink, or whatever, is a major project. Off of these highways in the towns, I rarely saw street that wasn't lined on both sides with cars, reminding me of the old neighborhoods in NYC, or Upper Queen Anne in Seattle. The only exceptions I ever saw to this was in the town of Randan, where I essentially had to pull up on the sidewalk to park. And of course there is never not any traffic behind you. Also, when it comes to breakdowns, per other websites I read, you are not supposed to just call your own road service (e.g. like from your rental car company). You are supposed to find one of those yellow SOS roadside phones, call that, the national tow truck service (I guess) will then tow you to a designated lot, then you call your road service. I can count on one hand the number of these SOS phones I saw, on all roads I traveled, in a near-1200km drive. I shudder to think what a major car breakdown would have put me through.
2- The roundabouts
These are of course a better idea than crossroad stop signs and lights that get people in so many wrecks in the USA, but roundabouts with 4-5 different exits that send you onto roads and highways where there is possibly no turning around for miles can be your nightmare, as they were mine off and on. And where multiple serial roundabouts dump into each other (did you turn into the right one, or the wrong one?) like in Montpelier, they are a multiple nightmare. Google maps knows, or tries to know, the exit you should take out of the roundabout. But even she gets confused. I had multiple times where "take exit 2" should have been "take exit 3", and so on. And without G-maps to call out the "D" sign/road number you would be completely blind, as I nearly was sometimes. The biggest letdown, or should I say "wrench thrown into G-maps" was the fact that the G-maps French road name rarely if ever matched the sign-name at the various exits. And to add to the confusion, on the approach to these roundabouts there usually was a big plaque-sign map on poles giving you a preview of the various exit road names...but I don't remember a one of these matching each other. So even the preview they give you is more or less worthless. The only thing that G-maps was dependable about, and which the existing signs very rarely failed to have was the yellow "D" signs, ex: "D209", "D750", etc. So I simply started ignoring the rest of the chatter and the French road names and just counted on the "D" signs. But even these weren't a guarantee. Simply trying to pull back onto the A75 after stopping for gas in little Gignac, what should have been an easy exit from the roundabout back onto the thing threw me into confusion and out onto an old 2-lane road lined with cottonwood trees right up to the road edge, that also had some construction going on, and on which I had to drive for a good half-mile before I could hit another roundabout and turn around and drive back, to finally get on the freeway. No turning around or pulling over. I finally developed the technique of simply driving around and around within the roundabout, with G-maps chattering away and correcting herself over and over, until I got some reasonable certainty of the exit I should take. Nobody cares, you just get a little dizzy.
3- Street/road signs
Just like in Alabama, don't count on there being any, or any you can read or see, except the huge ones on the "A" roads, these were all generally good and communicated clearly. One of those things you just stop looking for, and I did. Arles comes to mind. I remember doing 2-3 circles taking "a left at..." per G-maps girl, and finally taking a right, then a left to see if she would shut up with that street name, and that did the trick.
4- The speed limits
There are speed limit signs occasionally on the in-town roads and for the sake of possible cameras you should pay attention to these (reminder: I got mailed a traffic violation for 24.00 on arriving back in Nice, with no idea where it occurred or for what...some camera somewhere), but they are mainly in your face on the big "A" roads. And they seem to change every couple miles, or few hundred yards. The Peugeot, being "brand new", was, like a Tesla I guess, smart enough to read these signs (they have a red circle with a white background, and black number on on that...kilometers-per-hour) and would display the current speed limit on the dash, which was sometimes handy, and cruise control to go with it would have been nice, if it hadn't been buried behind the steering wheel, but even this dash display wasn't dependable. Sometimes this would disappear off the dash and turn into three ellipses "..." and no sign in sight, so you didn't know what the limit was. A distinct liability with cameras tracking you. The fastest you can ever go on a French highway is 130kph, which is 80mph, I never saw any sign over that. But this would drop, on the highway from full speed, suddenly down to 90 or 70kph, and then back up, for no apparent good reason. This was very annoying after awhile, and of course if you didn't slow down fast enough into this new speed zone, you could be "snapped". But by the time I got back down to the coast I was ready to suffer any amount of tickets just to get the hell out of that car.
5- Lights behind crosswalks
I describe this experience in Week 2 Arles page. I tried keep this in mind a lot and most times remembered, but the one time I stopped in the crosswalk was infuriating, not being able to see the light, as there is no backing up of course. As well, there is such a thing as two lanes, where you are on the inside lane, and a taller vehicle on your right blocking the view of the light (also in Arles). You just have to wait until they go, if they do go, and that means it turned green for you.
6- Gas pumps that take a CC...and then don't
This happened to me in a brand new Shell station going east to Nice. The gas pumps had been taking this card all the way up to Vichy and back, and suddenly the pump rejected the card, causing me to loose more teeth enamel and call the CC bank and find out if they had slapped a hold on the thing I didn't know about (I'd done the travel alert with them before I left home). No, they hadn't, card was still good. I take it inside, in a freezing wind that had moved in suddenly, the clerk takes the card with a slightly annoyed smirk and says he has to run it in there. Sure enough, card was still good. Only he had to run it. At a brand new Shell station, what the hell. At least the driveway back onto the highway was clear.
7- Toll booths
Last (?) and not least, the endless toll booths. I'm sure this is one of those evils of life French people are used to, but to me it just got really tedious. Even after my horrible experience stuck in the booth with the "broken" reverse gear, I still managed to pull into one of those same pay-method-less booths later and had to back out and try another one. Generally, try to look for the green-neon-framed "$" sign signed booths, and stay away from anything with a yellow-neon background, especially with the small "t" (that's T) as these are all auto-pay, your license plate snapped or whatever. As I mentioned in the Monaco page, the cabbie told me it costs about 200 euros in toll fees to drive from the south coast to Paris. Counting them up I count 13-15 different toll charges, varying from two to twenty (or more) bucks. Which was plenty.
For the record, I never saw anything resembling the sort of road rage / crazy driving that's routine in the USA. From the pre-trip reading I did, the French are probably as severe about drivers flaunting the road rules as they are in England. 40kph over the speed limit and it's instant impound, license pull, and off to jail. And of course once you're "snapped" on a violation there's no arguing. The only prickliness I experienced on the road was coming back down south, maybe north of Avignon, where some youngster in a low black station wagon type vehicle came way over to the fast lane where I was, buzzed across my tail flashing his lights. Couldn't figure out what I'd done to rile him as I was surely doing no reckless driving at all. Maybe he was envious of my "brand new" P-208. I would have traded him anytime.
I will end with the as-always "you had to be there". And maybe you will, but keep the above descriptions in mind, and the ingredients. You won't see them in the travel emails. Happy taxi/bus/train riding, in France!