Bonjour

To my 3 loyal readers, sorry for the long delay in posting. I just returned from an 18-day holiday in France, driving around the countryside trying very hard to avoid getting killed by crazy French drivers.

As I mentioned previously, my daughter has been studying in Paris under the study abroad program so we decided to join her at the end of the semester and tour the countryside for a couple of weeks. I suppose I could have stolen a few hours here and there to write a brief post or two, but the reality is that there are very few places to get on the internet in rural France. We had a laptop with us but I barely had time late in the evening to upload and organize our digital pictures, given the way that my wife likes to organize vacations. Lets just say that she likes to “fill the day.”

So, now that I am back in the land of large cars and wide streets, I finally have some time to collect my thoughts. The first thing I noticed in France, even in Paris, was that except for business usage, the internet does not appear to be nearly as much a part of people’s lives as here in L.A. As I mentioned previously, the American University doesn’t require that students submit their reports or even get their assignments online. When they need to do research online, most students just use the shared workstations at school or go to an internet cafe. The latter is still very common for private e-mail or casual internet use. When they do have a computer at home, most use dial-up rather than broadband. We all got the strong impression that the French just don’t see the internet as being important in their personal lives. Here in Los Angeles, it is rare for people to not have a private e-mail account and internet cafe’s are fast becoming a thing of the past.

The second interesting part of my trip was getting around. We were lucky and got an upgraded car with a navigation system. Truth is, I hadn’t even thought about asking for one and was pleasantly surprised when I sat down in the car. In fact, when the screen first came to life with some sort of welcome notice in French, I first thought it was just a fancy audio system that was going to be difficult to translate. When I noticed GPS in the corner, I thought, wow, it”s going to be fun to see if this thing is really what people rave about.

Although in past blog posts I have made comments about GPS technology, this was the first time I had a chance to really test it out. It turned out to be extremely useful, especially in the circumstances we found ourselves in France. After picking up the car and navigating our way to our timeshare the old fashioned way, I sat down in the evening and studied the instruction book a bit. I then went out to the car while my wife and daughter were getting organized and worked my way though the commands to get the language changed to English. That took several minutes as the DVD uploaded and reset everything. Then this pleasant female voice with a British accent said hello and announced that the process was finished.

Over the next few days, we figured out how to use the various features with my wife entering in each destination, picking from among different routes offered, and trying the various settings for fastest route, shortest route, avoiding motorways, etc. The system also had data for tourist spots, gas stations, etc, but we didn’t find those to be very useful, opting to just enter in the city center and then finding our way around. Monique, as I decided to call her even though she had a British accent, was really quite smart. Although she didn’t always send us on routes that I would have picked, she always got us to our destination. Whether I picked shortest route or fastest route, she seemed to favor these tiny little rural roads that were barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, some that forced one car partly off the road. This was pretty nerve racking for me given the speed that French people drive. There were many times I wondered if we would meet a big tour bus or truck around the next bend and that would be it for us. I’m sure that many people were cursing the fact that I was only driving the speed limit as they flew up behind me anxiously waiting to pass.

Of course, there were a number of mistakes in Monique’s database – things like one-way roads she tried to send us into, non-existent roundabout exits, telling us to turn into the middle of a wheatfield, even roads that were not on her map at all making it appear on her screen as if we were off-roading it. After several days we learned that we couldn’t just trust Monique implicitly. We had to do three things: listen to her voice instructions, glance at the on-screen map for clarification when a complex intersection was coming up, and pay attention to the signs. In Europe even with a GPS system, a good gut-level sense of direction is still an essential ingredient to successfully getting around.

When things went smoothly, I was feeling pretty good knowing that the person behind me hadn’t a clue that I was a tourist, navigating roundabouts and complex intersections quickly and confidently. I must say that there were very few times where we were stopped in an intersection arguing and frantically pointing this way or that way.

At one bed and breakfast we were staying at, the hosts commented about a bad experience they had with their first navigation systems. Apparently this one was pretty inaccurate, earning her the title “navi-bitch.” They said that they had to decommission her and get a replacement. For some odd reason, my first reaction was to come to Monique’s defense. After all, she hadn’t gotten us lost even once, and even amazed us at how well she led us through unmarked narrow streets in towns and villages and along country roads that we never would have tried.

Even though we had only been using it for about a week, we all came to the same conclusion: when renting a car in a foreign country, request a GPS system. With a little luck, the map data will be up to date and accurate and your travels will be greatly enhanced, Who knows, you may also develop a close personal relationship with him or her.