(background image: mine, Chateau Villemont)
I thought of calling this "hell week" instead of just "Week 2", but in reality the hell was only the first two days, and the last drive-day back, with various little sparks throughout the week. I expand on the whole France driving experience in the "Driving in France" page.
The rough layout of the trip was to do the first week in Nice area getting familiar, then rent a car and do a nice long drive to "get to know the place" and see some of these amazing chateau/castles I'd been reading about and pining to see for 10+ years, then do the last week back in Nice with various day trips to who knows where. So I got my big road trip and definitely "got to know the place" via rental car, and it won't be done that way ever again without a native Frenchman driving for me, for free. As my friend Jeanne said "if a good bus or train doesn't go there, I don't go". That is wise advice but the trouble is that these old castles are in very remote spots; the trains barely go to the towns they are near (notice I didn't say "in"). So a car it has to be, if no tour bus goes there.
The whole episode below with the "broken reverse gear" episode with the Peugeot is almost too embarrassing to relate, but worth telling for what I think is a classic example of how much turmoil can be caused by a simple communication breakdown from both ends, mostly on the rental-car-shop end for my money. With all the effects amplified like mad in a foreign country/language environment. Hopefully this example will save others some grief in their travels. I have been through some tense times in all my USA foreign travels, but this one was the absolute worst so far.
9/7 Saturday - checked out of La Rossini and got a ride over to the Enterprise rental car office on 33-34 Auber Ave. with my pile of gear in tow as I had a hotel booked up near Vichy (yes that's the same Vichy where the pro-Nazi French government operated in WWII). The Enterprise shop operated in the typical ultra-tight street access, and their own setup for storing and releasing cars to renters. There is one driveway ramp up out of their basement, in which one car was stopped, waiting to get out, and they had to somehow get my car out around this. The street was packed with parked cars (none of them theirs) and cars being returned or moved blocked the single lane of the one-way street, making for angry drivers honking to get on their way, not conducive at all to long chats with the car boys. They had pulled mine up, a brand new 2024 Peugeot 208 which just looked like a 4-door sedan to me but is one of their "hotter" cars. There were two kids running the counter, both spoke decent English and one of them brought the key out, telling me right off "the automatic door opener doesn't work on it, you have to lock it manually..." Big deal. I asked "does it have cruise control?" "No, it doesn't". Found out later that it did have cruise control, of course, but as the first of the magic 208 Peugeot features, they hide it carefully below and behind the steering wheel like so:
As you can see, and that I found out, you have to crank the steering wheel hard right or left to see to operate the cruise control. An amazing design but maybe you have to be French to know how to work it going down the road. And maybe the rental kid thought it had no cruise control because he could never see it. Every other car in the world I've ever seen, Japanese, Korean, American, all have the cruise control on top of the steering wheel where you can see it and adjust it without having to crank the wheel into the guardrail. So that's the cruise control, I never did use it but it would have been handy and maybe saved me the traffic violation they emailed me after I got back. Never did find out where or for what these were for! Cameras all over the place on French roads, just like England. The car was also a stick shift, no sweat for me because I've been driving them for 30 years but I wonder what sort of surprise it would be to some American who was assuming they were going to get an automatic? That would be a "sticky" situation, yuk yuk. I noticed later that this was communicated on the contract email but which was all in French too. So make sure you ASK for an automatic if you need one, I think the default in Europe is probably stick shift.
SO glad I studied the route out of Nice to the highway before I took off as there is immediately someone on my tail in the one-lane/one-way street I'm blocking and for some typical reason, Google maps did not engage. Took a right on the right street, got into the right tunnel, did the U-turn onto the freeway, then off an off-ramp into the town, morning worker traffic, Google maps now engaged but streets are narrow and less than clear, also glad I studied road signs in advance. After a wrong-lane stop and fast scoot-around of the car next to me, it's right onto the ocean-front M6098 highway going west and out of town. Before long merge onto big good highway A8. BTW all the "A" highways are in great shape, and varying between 2/4 lanes and 3/6 lanes. Sunny day, no traffic backups, countryside reminds me of American Midwest done slightly tropical. It's humid here all the time but not murderous like USA S.E./East coast. Just east of Aix-en-Provence, which is a medium-sized college town just north of Marseilles, I hit a toll both, the first one on my route. Note that I have been moving forward the whole time since Nice, about a 2hr/180km drive so far, and no reason or opportunity to go in reverse. So I pull into what looks like a likely toll booth (more on toll stops later) but lo, there is nowhere to either pay with a card, take a ticket, or insert a ticket. There is something like a slot with icons like envelopes for someone (maybe a trucker who knows how to drop in a payment maybe?). I look behind me to try to back out of the booth and try another one and yikes the car will not engage reverse. The stick will go to the reverse position, but the car only goes forward. I try this 3-4 times and every time the car inches forward so that in a few minutes the toll bar is sitting right on my windshield. Wow. I am now frantic and punching the red "Assistance" button, which gets me some young dude on the speaker who doesn't speak English, but who spoke enough English to keep telling me he didn't speak English, or ask me why I needed a policeman. The road noise around me is massive, it is windy, and after trying to tell this guy what is wrong, he plays a scratchy recording that sounds like "arceeehrrrererere number one at a time please", in accented English. This keeps playing over and over. I am in despair. Trying to push the car backwards in some sort of neutral gear, it will not move. I am ready to brave multiple lanes of approaching cars to walk to the nearest building a little ways off and try to get some help when suddenly the bar lifts. The guy or some robot mechanism finally gave up trying to get a payment from me, or out of some perverted mercy, which may have ended up as one of my traffic charges. I sped off sweating and turning the air blue. This was a disaster, a car that would not go in reverse! I pull off a mile or so ahead into Aix-en-Provence, at the first roundabout I dive into a residential side street and park. Then commences a tug-of-war over the phone between myself and the Enterprise car people, with various agents who speak either no English or very ragged English sitting there in the near-90-degree heat, with my phone charge running down (no standard USB connector in the car) which will disconnect me from Google maps, another disaster in the making. After an hour of waiting for a tow truck to show up, I call back on case number 214HY058 (I will never forget that number...), and ask the Enterprise desk what is happening. Suddenly another phone is ringing and it is the Peugeot people, from which a helpful girl who speaks decent English tells me that because the car is brand new it is under warranty and they have to tow it, not Enterprise (I note later that she did not give me any case number from their Peugeot desk, nor any number to call her back directly if their tow guy didn't show up...things you forget when you're tearing your teeth out). I had tried to call the Enterprise office in Nice (remember is it Saturday afternoon about 2pm), which was supposed to be "Open" per Google maps, but no one answered. So I wait and voila, in about an hour the Peugeot tow truck shows up. The young guy is friendly and asks what the matter is. I tell him, "No reverse, no matter what I try!". He gets in the car and throws it in reverse and voila, it goes in reverse. He asks "so what's the trouble?" With an exploding face I say "what did you do?!". He shows me. In Peugeots, there is a little plastic collar that you have to pull up on to engage the reverse gear. If you don't do that, it will always operate in forward gears. Period. The visual:
Note: as per picture, there is no indicator on the gear shift to show you to pull up on this damn thing and had the Enterprise guys showed me this one thing it would have saved all this trouble. Having driven Ford, Nissan and Honda stick shifts for 30+ years, I had never seen a stick where you had to do something first, to allow the shift to go in reverse. I thought it was interesting, thinking about it later, that not one person in either the Enterprise help desk (of the 2-3 people I talked to there) nor the Peugeot help desk asked me what I was trying to do with the (brand new) vehicle, or offered any suggestions as to what to try to make the thing operate in reverse. What expletives can I use? Getting over my fury I punch it out of there to get to Arles before dark. After I arrived at Arles and did some research via manuals for this Peugeot 208 on gear operations and what might be wrong, I still did not find one word about pulling up on that collar on the gear shift! Only Peugeot. Which is why Japanese cars rule the world, and France is stuck with Peugeot. I could only imagine the fallout if it would have been a woman with a couple kids stuck in that toll booth. Perhaps I, and they, should have put inspector Clouseau on it?!
Moral: a) make sure you make the rental guy show you how the car works and don't just assume it's going to be like every other car you've ever driven, and b) don't ever drive or buy Peugeot, period. Unless you bring a Clouseau with you. And in case anyone is thinking that I'm just being too much of a whining sucker about Peugeot and their support systems, I lean on the below forum posts and will even image a couple of them in case the forum disappears ('cause I love Peugeot so much):
https://www.peugeotforums.com/threads/peugeot-complaints-department.359767/
Convinced? After this volcanic emotional experience, feeling drained, furious and stupid, I texted myself "I will never buy or rent a Peugeot" 100 times then in a sweaty daze got back out on the A8 and had a relatively emotion-free drive to Arles, with an implanted low-grade horror now of French toll booths and this brand new car. What the hell else is it going to throw at me? I remember later in Arles studying up on how to get the gas flap open as I knew I had to gas up before long, and on leaving getting a rush of relief when, ya howdy, the gas flap actually opened when I pushed on it. No new shocks there. And that is it for the Peugeot rant 'n rave. And to lighten this whole stupid story, I will, with a string of clips from "Curse of the Pink Panther". Sellers is of course the king of the Clouseaus, but I loved Ted Wass's step-in when he played it, it's only 4 minutes. The classic blowup doll scenes (try to ignore the spacey background music, don't know how I got that mixed in with the clips but I did):
The countryside to Arles was sort of classic French, the road lined with a lot of tall pretty cedars. And maybe this is a good spot to divert a little and talk about Google Maps to which I became absolutely dependent and addicted this trip, and would have been in even more dire situations without it. Even when G-Maps was ignorant of up-to-the-minute road developments (like the event in Arles that blocked off half the streets unbeknownst to me or the "Maps Girl", or the godawful mess of street names in the endless roundabouts that never matched), she generally did the right thing. I just hope the satellites always hold up or there's going to be a lot of lost people on the roads, and even walking. Like me.
Arles - arrived probably around 4pm. The town of Arles is an ancient little place about 50km west of Aix-en-Provence where I'd booked a room at the Hôtel de l'Amphithéâtre which, per the map, was right in the town embedded in one of the old buidlings on the ancient little streets about 50 yards from the old Roman amphitheater. The town was packed with cars, the streets tiny, and in spite of correct instructions from Google maps, I drove around in circles 3-4 times in different spots before finally making sense of the streets, which were clogged with traffic. However, Google maps girl kept sending me into dead-end blockoffs that made no sense. I was wrung out, sweat-soaked, and at wits-end so I pulled over somewhere and called the hotel desk. "So sorry monsieur, there is an event on and you cannot park at the hotel, you have to park down below". I had no idea there was an "event on" either, which was a non-lethal bullfight as it turned out. Arles has a history of bullfighting, as spelled out in the below info which my son Corey sent me in a snap:
So I started driving through the packed-up parking lots aimlessly for a spot and becoming more convinced that I was not going to get one, because (as it turned out too), the event was extended to the next day Sunday also. This was the first time I seriously considered turning around, taking the car back to Nice and telling them to shove it and cancelling the rest of my trip up north. But I didn't and I'm glad I didn't. Sitting there, suddenly this angel in disguise, a burly French guy, signals to me "Monsieur...." and points to his car which he and his wife were about to get into. He backs out, I salute him and pull in, and the blood drains from my head with relief. I now have to haul all my gear, about 100 pounds of it, up into the town and to the hotel, which turns out to be about a half a mile, part of it up a steep ramp through crowds as the event of that day was just letting out and the place was a mob scene, see pics. I get to the hotel, the desk guy Eunice looks half-shocked at my appearance and sympathetically asks if I actually hauled all that gear up that hill...."yes, I did, and bonjour to you too". He gets me into the room, which is directly across the 8-foot wide ancient street/alley, and I collapse, shower, and crash for two hours, wondering if I should bother trying to eat that night. The room is very elegant though, with a great Roman-style shower. This sort of open shower design seems to be pretty common in France, it was the same at Hotel du Bost up north and it's convenient, though they have the closed-door kind also like this arrangement at the La Rossini hotel which turn out to be just a bit too small for comfort which is what you get when a conglomerate sub-divides the hell out of a previously spacious room set in a gracious old building. I just couldn't give them a good review, you have to beware of the wide-angle promo photos and read the reviews. But then surprises are part of international travel.
Cleaned up and off the road went out walking to see the place. The town of course is built around the ancient Roman forum that they built (there is another just like it in Nimes) and this was another surprise. I was expecting (why?!) a sort of preserved UNESCO-type site, and there are some of these around France, with the ancient buildings roped off and untouched but they did the exact opposite here, adding modern bleachers, lights, sound system, and gating to the whole thing for modern events (like non-lethal bullfights!), both to the big forum and the smaller Roman theater a little way to the side of the big forum. But there are two arguments to this approach and I thought it was valid enough, bring in some commerce and let people experience modern things in it. Lord knows there are enough empty/preserved ruins in France and elsewhere in Europe. The crowd certainly was having a good time, and I had landed on the first of a two-day event, bullfights both days. I confirmed real quick whether they actually still killed the bulls here but no, they just put some collars on the bull horns and tease them or whatever. There is still plenty of tradition though, as you can see in the below pics and videos. I took quite a few shots here which will let me shut up and get onto some nice visuals. Again hover for random comments in the pics.
I took a number of night shots through the streets after the event, the atmosphere and light really had an old feel. The only downside of this hotel was that they let motorbikes ride through these ancient little streets, which are only 8-10 feet wide. Since my room windows fronted right on the street, the bike noise was practically right in the room. Their cops are supposed to prevent this but they don't, I considered it sort of a degrade to the quaint old feel of the place and told the desk guy so and that they should put "pedestrian only" pegs at the end of the streets.He was apologetic and they probably won't but it's another example of the sort of surprise you get going into a place blind. Another 50 years and we will probably be free of all internal combustion effects. There is a good mix of all-electric scooters in Nice but they are probably more expensive than the explosive kinds so there's still a lot of excess noise.
9/8 Sunday - up early and out and about. Lots of eat shops around the big forum and in the old town. I went down to the town square where the fountain and cathedral are, vintage 1500's and later, I didn't try to guess. But the first thing I saw was this crazy collection of brass players around and IN the fountain, voila:
Farther on in the town they had this long double-fence with heavy rails set up that was packed with people so I edged up and it was a traditional gypsy event, with mainly gypsy participants, probably called "running the bulls" or such. I heard some English spoke near me and right next to me was this couple my age from England, the guy was an English doctor and the woman was Scotch-Irish, I ID'd her accent and she told me that. I was so starved to hear English spoken we got into a blazing conversation about France and the bull thing and a bunch of other stuff, really nice people. Here's the short video. The horsemen ride in front and are there to protect the kids hanging onto the bull, probably to slow the bulls down I guess. I watched them "run" 2-3 different bulls I think, and I didn't see that any of them had any big horns, but these kids were fearless, hanging all over its neck and crowding it like mad, amazing:
And while I'm at it here is the "drum circle" that they did at the fountain after the first day's event:
Some amazing lunch I sat down for. I gave the waitress a nice tip, habit, and she was very appreciative. In France service people don't generally (I read) expect or get tips, it's sort of built into their salaries/wages so tips are a nice surprise for them.
9/9 Monday - up early, time to hit the road for Bellarive-sur-Alliers (Hotel du Bost, near Vichy). Did the goodbye breakfast at their great little cafe, where I had to use the Google translator a bit as the waitress spoke pretty much no English (but Eunice, that's a guy, at the front desk did speak some tolerable English). They had some comical art on the wall to go with the faire, see below along with the classy sitting room. Always lots of great bread, I think I ate more bread in the three weeks in France than I had in the past year.
Walking out to the car through the empty 7am town, I tried to get into the forum to get a pic but the one guard girl said No. There were a few workers cleaning the place up still, and the below was as close as I got to seeing the inside of it, too bad.
And exiting the forum circle I was met with this gruesome sight! They'd painted the steps red and it had rained hard overnight so you got this running-blood look...what else could it be but the bulls eh? Too symbolic.
By this time I was braced for anything, including having my car towed but I'd moved it the night before to make sure it wasn't noticed in the same spot too long and I needn't have worried, all parking was free for the event and there were more people than me walking their luggage through the town to their cars. I fired it up and turned on G-maps and snaked through the town, which now was alive with morning commuters and pedestrians. The "drivin' creeps" started setting in immediately,and with a lot of horizontal sun in my eyes I started making for the freeway. Had to slam the brakes a few times for pedestrians walking out in dimly painted crosswalks and ended up stopping right on one, in front of the light. In France, everywhere, they don't hang the stoplights out in the intersection like in the USA. They are little, on little poles on the right hand corner, right at eye level and the crosswalks at the corners are in front of the lights, so if you don't watch and land in the crosswalk, the light is behind you and you can't see when it turns green for you to go. I'd read about this and had got the hang of it already, but this morning I was rattled already and landed in the crosswalk like a blockhead. I could see that my light was still red as there was cross traffic, but what to do if that blanked suddenly? All I could do was bite my nails and swear and wait for the sneering Frenchman behind me to honk at me when the light turned green. He did, and I punched it. The freeway ramp was dead ahead about 100 yards and without hitting anything I raced up onto it. I was never so glad to get on a freeway in my bleedin' life!
Now I was on the A54/A9/A709 to Montpelier, which was the route G-maps picked, and why not? Nice big "A" highways, only it didn't turn out that way. Whatever "big" roads I was supposed to be on turned into a gnarly series of connectors, by-roads, and roundabouts. The place was choked with morning commuter traffic and after 4-5 big roundabouts one right after another I was more or less dizzy and into a sort of numbness which I noticed I developed anytime I got into a confusing situation. I just kept going and tried not to freak out. I am dead serious when I say everyone should avoid going by way of Montpelier if they can help it at all. I actually don't know how I got out of the place, just a bad memory now, but somehow I got spit out of some roundabout or another onto the A750 toward Gignac and I was free. I pulled over after a bit (another oddity I'll cover in "Driving in France") and got my bearings. I'd map-stopped a gas station about 100km up the road to get gas but I was already down to about 40km worth (one good feature of the Peugeot 208, it very accurately tells you how many kilometers worth of gas you have left), so I swung into Gignac and got some gas. Another little frontier to cross, the cars there take multiple different kinds of gas, pasted on the inside of the gas flap. But I didn't know which one was best to use and I sure didn't want to add engine clog-up to my other woes so I asked a young guy at the pump ahead of me, via Google translator and "what the hell" sign language if he could help tell me what gas I should put in to the thing. Turned out to be E10 (or E5, but E10 is better), he was very helpful and got a grin out of the whole thing. This was deluxe. I now knew the right gas, the card worked in the pump, so I could get on with flat-out driving finally, and I did.
I will just end this page with the drive up to Hotel du Bost and put that and castle-hopping on another page for Week 2 (did I say don't go through Montpelier?!). I wish I could have gotten some pics of the scenery on the way up. It was rainy/sunny and there is some really stunning country up the A75 past Saint-Felix-de-Lodez. It is a mix of Arizona and the Blue Ridge mountains is the best way I can describe. Huge towering outcroppings, huge bridges over long valleys, and the whole country does a steady rise upwards toward Lyon latitude and finally levels out. I couldn't get a pic of it going 70mph but I drove over this stunning Millau Viaduct bridge which spans a huge gorge, super engineering feat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct
There were some other valleys/gorges near as big, with a lot of houses in them. No problem with the driving, though I noticed the car has a weird consistent tendency to slip 'n slide when crossing lane stripes, even when dry. What a surprise. Finally getting close to Bellarive-surv-Alliers (Hotel du Bost community, across the river from Vichy), I started seeing ancient towers and things plunked on tall hilltops which was a thrill. In fact the whole drive up is one long tease of amazing old places. The roadside is a continuous sign-show of these huge maybe 8' x 10' duotone plaques with graphic pics of this castle or that abbey, like Conques for example, and I was groaning over all this great stuff I was going by and wanted to duck in for, but I wanted to get to Hotel du Bost during daylight and who knows how much work it would be for any of these diversions. Only the locals know. Checking the map, Conques is about 40 miles west of the A75, they don't build the highways up to them. Continued to pedal-down and got to Hotel du Bost without trouble, checked in somehow with the help of the French-only speaking long-haired 20-something Pierre, and then made it to their dining room after road recovery.
Not having been to Paris and wondering if I'll ever go at this point, I can't be sure on the comparison but I would say that Hotel du Bost is probably close to the top-drawer dinner and presentation that you'd expect for France and as they promote the dining there heavily I would guess that it has to meet French expectations. I'd never had a dinner like it. The background music was Enya and Ennio Morricone movie tracks I knew well (the old westerns and newer films), all nice and low...and the next day at breakfast it was Euro-pop. As the waiter Pierre speaking only French, I barely knew what I was ordering, or how many different courses. He just seemed a bit flustered when I only ordered one thing, the entree, and I remembered that you're always supposed to order more than one thing. Anyway, they starting bringing the different dishes and they kept coming. Little ones first, then the entree, then the cheese, wow. The pics tell it, and some history of the building too.
official site - if the video plays you can get a good aerial view of it
I first thought it was a dessert tray but on closer look the below was the cheese cart. I could have loaded up a plate four inches high with all the different things, Pierre just kept cutting me slices of whatever I pointed at, but I just tried four, and one of them was this fantastic slightly hot variety but there was no way I could have gotten the name of it.
The bedroom, and a look out the windows at the moat, plenty of ducks, and the quaint bath window, no screens, just like in the old days.
Breakfast was free every morning (I think...they just totaled it all up when I checked out and I barely looked at it). Standard faire. And an observation on fashion, 'scuze me. I had read up for weeks before getting to France about how much better they dressed, and you were supposed to dress. It seems to be a fantasy. I couldn't help snapping the old guy's pic during dinner, and this at a classy restaurant. All sports stuff, just like the USA, and this is what I saw everywhere I went in the country, and the same went for the waiters/waitresses here. So maybe it's just Paris on high holidays? I snapped a few general people pics later in Nice to show the trend. For dinner I should have dressed in the sport jacket 'n classy shoes I'd brought, but I would have been overdressed. Another reason you have to see the place on site, period. I didn't hit any museums except the Oceanographique in Monaco, which was too bad, supposedly people are supposed to dress up for those (like classy restaurants) but I'd make even money they don't. So don't worry about it. Dress as down as you like in France, they all do.
Tomorrow starts the chateau hunting.