503 - Join Us in France Travel Podcast

Table of Contents for this Episode

[00:00:15] Annie Sargent: This is Join Us in France, Episode 503, cinq-cent-trois.

Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.

Today on the podcast

[00:00:30] Annie Sargent: Today, I bring you a conversation with Matthew Gamache about exploring France by car, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.

You’ll hear about renting a car in France, speed regulations, road signs and roundabouts, freeways and tolls, rest stops and amenities, and last but not least, driver behavior. You can do this with a little help from your favorite France podcast.

Podcast supporters

[00:00:54] Annie Sargent: This podcast is supported by donors and listeners who buy my tours and services, including my Itinerary Consult Service, my GPS self-guided tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, or take a day trip with me around the southwest of France in my electric car. You can browse all of that at my boutique: JoinUsInFrance.com/boutique.

Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready, and ads free. If that sounds good to you be like them, follow the link in the show notes.

The Magazine segment

[00:01:24] Annie Sargent: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Matthew today, I’ll discuss swimming in the Seine River and Olympics goings on, as well as a tiny bit of political update.

[00:01:36] Annie Sargent: Did you notice that I finally sent out a newsletter?

I think I found a format that suits me finally. Now, I will not be emailing you every five minutes, but I may send one a month, or perhaps two a month. But I like it when you write back, and especially share tips with me, like Denise did. I mentioned an upcoming trip to Lille, and she gave me some great tips. I love it, thank you, Denise. I even got a response from Oliver G. because he likes basketball too. If you would like to get the newsletter, go to joinusinfrance.com/newsletter to sign up.

Bonjour, Matthew Gamache, and welcome to Join Us in France.

[00:02:24] Matthew Gamache: Bonjour, Annie. Thanks for having me on.

[00:02:25] Annie Sargent: Yes, welcome back. You’ve been on the podcast a few times. You’re one of the very early fans of the podcast, so thank you for being back, and talking to me about driving in France versus driving in North America. This is something that you do a lot because you come visit. And not just France, you’ve been all through a lot of European countries, right?

[00:02:48] Matthew Gamache: Yeah, I have. So I have a fair amount of experience.

[00:02:50] Annie Sargent: Yes. So obviously, driving in France is very different from what you experience in the US and the first thing is, you know, our roads are not like the size of runways.

[00:03:03] Matthew Gamache: Yeah.

Narrow Roads in France

[00:03:05] Annie Sargent: You cannot land a plane on French roads. It’s very narrow usually. So that’s the biggest difference. But overall, what has been your experience driving in France over the years?

[00:03:15] Matthew Gamache: Sure. Yeah. For some context, I live in Greater Boston and Massachusetts, and people drive pretty aggressively around here, and there’s a lot of traffic. And I think that there’s just not, you know, you talked about big roads, I don’t think we have really the road capacity over here to handle a lot of the traffic.

So, I don’t really enjoy driving around here, around home. It’s just pretty much, you encounter a lot of traffic and a lot of aggressive driving. So I think a lot of the things about driving in Europe that are challenging are also challenging where I live, whether it’s smaller roads, traffic, smaller cars, I drive a small car, parallel parking. A lot of that stuff I kind of deal with on a day to day basis. Some of the differences that I noticed weren’t really challenges in France as much as kind of things that are a little bit more easily understood, and a little bit nicer. So generally speaking, I’ve had good experiences in driving in France, and I think with a little bit of preparation it’s been not too bad.

Renting a car in France

[00:04:17] Annie Sargent: How many times have you rented a car in France?

[00:04:20] Matthew Gamache: Three times, for three big trips. And I’ve been able to cover a good portion of the country from east to west, and from north to south over the course of those three trips. So all total, we’re talking about 10 weeks more or less, and driving to a lot of the big tourist places in France, although always avoiding Paris.

[00:04:43] Annie Sargent: So how do you avoid Paris? You just rent your car somewhere else? Or do you pick up a car at the airport and then drive off somewhere else? How did you handle that?

[00:04:51] Matthew Gamache: So I’ve done it a couple of different ways. In the first couple trips, we would land in CDG and take the train directly from the train station to, in this case the Loire Valley, and pick up the car there. I like that because in your first day, it’s kind of a travel day anyway, and if you want to get long distances without driving jet lagged, that seems to have worked.

Now, logistically, you need everything to work out, which I know is a little bit stressful because got a train time, you know, if you’ve got a plane landing time, a train pickup time, a car pickup time. So you need all that to work out. But if it doesn’t, you just adjust.

So that’s one way I’ve done it. Another way is I’ve flown into Orly airport and driven right out of there, which I found to actually be pretty easy. I think it’s, it was like 15 minutes of somewhat urban driving and then you’re on a beautiful highway. So I don’t have the experience of… oh yeah, and then coming back on our trips, one time we took the TGV from the South, one time we took the TGV from the east, and one time we flew out of Geneva airport.

So for us, once we’re ready to go to Paris at the end of these trips, we just take the train and drop off the car there and avoid it. So I don’t have the experience of driving in or out of Charles de Gaulle airport. I know others have said it’s relatively fine, but the closest I’ve been in Paris is Orly.

[00:06:13] Annie Sargent: Yeah. Yeah. The thing to remember when you’re renting a car in France is that, most French cities don’t have a lot of choices, it’s not like going to the airport and have a big counter full of possibilities. If you rent from a smaller town, well, you might have one or two choices, and you need to pay attention to opening and closing times because they don’t stay open that late.

They are often not open on Sundays and Saturdays, so look at that as well. And yesterday I was talking to someone who had, well, she had booked a train from Paris, so she’s landing in CDG, she wanted to make her way immediately to the south of France, but her train was starting from Paris center, from Gare de Lyon. And I was like, well, that’s, you’re making your life difficult here. You can get on the TGV right at the airport, right at CDG, so if that’s what you want to do. You know, she thought she was just going to get on the train in Paris, and I asked her to look at her tickets because I couldn’t find the time.

She told me, oh, our train leaves at, I can’t remember, 11:30. And I’m like, I’m not seeing a train at 11:30. Could you check the departure? And she’s like, oh, it’s Gare de Lyon. I’m like: Ah! So pay attention to that sort of thing.

[00:07:31] Matthew Gamache: Yeah. Being able to get on the TGV in Charles de Gaulle is an amazing benefit of travel in France and that, I think it’s great. But you also speak to another point is that, you know, you should start looking at your car or train options when you start planning your trip. Don’t plan your trip and then figure it out later. I feel like. When I’m building an itinerary, I’m in parallel looking at, okay, where can I get the car? Can I get a car in that day? Do they have automatics? All of those things are part of the search process that’s going on with the looking for flights and making sure that the itinerary works.

[00:08:09] Annie Sargent: Yeah, and in your case, you traveled with your wife and your two daughters. I assume you don’t travel too heavy. You probably have a carry on kind of thing.

Packing light helps when you travel

[00:08:19] Matthew Gamache: Yeah, we pack extremely light. We each have one bag. And that’s really the benefit of the kind of the modern way of what we’ve been doing since 2015, is when we rent houses we have washer dryers, and that really helps with packing light. And so it’s part of the whole package. You know, we have one bag, one pretty big bag, but one bag we can each carry, and that allows us to rent smaller cars.

It allows us to use trains when we need to, and it just allows us to be more flexible, which is nice.

Size of the car to rent

[00:08:49] Annie Sargent: That’s another thing to consider is the size of car you’re going to rent. I think you would do better renting the smallest possible car you can get away with. How do you feel about that?

[00:09:00] Matthew Gamache: I agree. So we’ve always rented the ‘compact’ car on the options. And that is ironically, the cars we usually get are a little bit bigger than what I have at home, which is nice. But that, you know, choosing that option has always allowed us to have two adults in the front, two kids in the back, and enough room in the trunk for four bags.

And then whatever, you know, stuff we pick up along the way, which is mainly food and a cooler bag. So we’ve never had any issues with size, and usually the car that I get is better than what I have at home, so it’s got a couple options and things like that, so, but size wise, although compact seems small because of the word compact, but it’s worked out for us.

Do not rent electric if you don’t drive electric at home

[00:09:46] Annie Sargent: Yeah. One more thing that I need to add as you probably know, I drive a full electric car, and I love my electric car, I’m never going back to a gas car, but when renting a car in France, we’re not ready yet for mass market rentals, electric rentals. Not that there’s anything wrong with the cars, but the infrastructure to charge is excellent, we have chargers everywhere. The problem is how do you start the charge? Is it going to work with your credit card? You know, and you also need to understand the difference between level one, level two, level three charge, and if you don’t drive an electric car at home, you’re not going to get that.

There’s a bit of learning, there’s a brand new thing, there’s a bit of a learning curve. So personally, I would recommend that you stay away from electric cars and some car rental companies will try to make you rent an electric car and you should push back and just say, no, I prefer a gas car.

Is that something that you thought about? You haven’t been confronted with that?

[00:10:54] Matthew Gamache: I’m not going to go, yeah, I’ve never driven one, so I don’t know how it works, so I wouldn’t to start there. And for what it’s worth, in my trips, sometimes I’ve gotten a hybrid, sometimes I’ve gotten a diesel, sometimes I’ve gotten neither of those, and as long as it’s automatic, it all works for me.

[00:11:10] Annie Sargent: Yeah, and more and more cars in France in the rental pool and in the purchase pools, most people who buy a new car in France are getting automatic cars, you know, you have to go out of your way now to buy a manual.

[00:11:24] Matthew Gamache: Interesting, that’s a big change, isn’t it? For a short period of time…

[00:11:27] Annie Sargent: It’s a big change. Yes. It’s a big change. And that, that started about five years ago, I would say.

People just, I mean, they finally figured out that usually automatic cars are a bit more efficient and they’re a lot easier to drive.

[00:11:40] Matthew Gamache: Yeah. When we first started doing this, I guess in 2015, I was concerned about the supply and are we really going to get automatic, and questions like that? And I’ve never had any issue whatsoever. Which is nice.

Drive on the right hand side in France

[00:11:53] Annie Sargent: Right. I should mention also that we drive right hand side in France, just like you do in America. You know, 70 something percent of people, of listeners of this podcast are from North America, so that’s very important. I’m sorry for you Australians, and English, that you’re going to have to learn how to do it right.

Speed Cameras in France

[00:12:13] Annie Sargent: Another thing is that we have speed cameras in France, so we have a lot of them, we have red light cameras, and we have average speed cameras. In America, typically you can drive five over the speed limit, perhaps 10 over the speed limit and not get in any trouble. In France, one over the speed limit and you might be getting a ticket. What’s your experience with that?

[00:12:37] Matthew Gamache: Yeah, so I think this is the most important thing, is that you really need to mind your speed where you are, and just, I don’t know, I’ve not gotten a ticket, I guess I’m very aware of that, you know, you will get tickets, if you push the speed limit you’re going to get a ticket at some point if you’re driving around. That’s my impression anyway.

I’m pretty aware of it. And in the speed limit, I mean, I think that mindset is relatively good because what I see is that a lot of people on the road seem to be obeying the rules of the road, which is nice. It seems orderly to me, and especially on the highways where people are passing on the left, and obeying speed limits, it seems kind of orderly.

I feel like one contrast to the United States is that enforcement isn’t as strict as in France. And I think a lot of people grow up with their own kind of calibrated rules of how people should drive, so you oftentimes get into situations where you’re not driving as fast as people want you to, or as slow as people want you to.

I think there’s a little bit more tension, at least in around American cities, than what I’ve experienced in my, you know, limited time driving in France.

[00:13:44] Annie Sargent: In France, typically, the police will not chase people on the road. They avoid that as much as possible because it’s unsafe and because you don’t want to get into a chase with the police. It happens at times, but it’s rare. What we do is we put speed traps. And there are always signs warning you.

Waze App

[00:14:02] Annie Sargent: Okay. And if you use ‘Waze’, which a lot of French people, back years ago when we did an episode about driving in France with my husband, he insisted pretty heavily about the need to get some sort of GPS, you know, a ‘Garmin’ or whatever the other brand was at the time. Of course, these, we don’t use these anymore, we all have Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze. Waze is the one that’s most used in France. And so the more drivers you have, the more information Waze has on the real time traffic. And Waze will tell you that there’s a speed enforcement coming up. So, you know, there’s really no excuse. Typically, now in Toulouse, where I live, they’ve lowered the speed limit.

Speed Limit

[00:14:49] Annie Sargent: So the basis for the speed limit in cities used to be 50. Well, when I learned how to drive, it was 60. Then it went down to 50. Now in the cities, it’s 30 by default.

And some roads, they will put a sign where it’s saying, oh, it’s 50 on this road because it’s a wider road or whatever. So just be aware that the de facto speed limit in most French cities now is 30, not 50, like you’ve probably seen before. And if you follow, if you look at Waze, it will have the speed, anywhere you are, it will tell. Your car probably will tell you what the speed is on the road you’re on, because the car GPS knows these things.

[00:15:31] Matthew Gamache: Yeah. It’s been typical in my experience is that when you cross into a town, you go down from 80, or whatever to 50, and then when you get into the portion of town that has businesses and homes and stuff, it goes down to 30, and then it goes back up to 50 as you get through it. Which, to me, it seems right.

I wouldn’t want to be going 50 through the places where people are crossing.

[00:15:54] Annie Sargent: And more, it feels too fast to me, there are kids, there are bikes, there are animals, you can’t go very fast when you’re going through a town. So, yeah, I feel the same.

[00:16:04] Matthew Gamache: When, on our last trip, we spent a day in Germany, right over the border from France, and there, it was 20, and 20 really seemed slow.

[00:16:15] Annie Sargent: It felt slow.

[00:16:16] Matthew Gamache: It was really hard to actually get the… How much gas do I actually give it to get to go 20?

[00:16:21] Annie Sargent: Yeah. Yeah. And also the, like the cruise control, the speed limiter, doesn’t work so well when you’re that low, kick off and on, it’s not easy.

Road signs in France

[00:16:31] Annie Sargent: All right. Road signs in France, did you find that they are difficult to understand or is it fine?

[00:16:38] Matthew Gamache: Not really. I mean, I think the main thing you need to know is ‘Do not enter’ try to avoid that at all costs. Everything else I think is pretty self-explanatory.

[00:16:47] Annie Sargent: Right. So ‘Do not enter’. I will show you a few signs and how they work. So do not enter is this thing ‘Sens Interdit’. So if there’s a little panel underneath, it means, except for. So in this case, it’s, you may not enter, except if you’re a bike. All of these, so this one here, and for people who are not watching the video I’m showing the sign, it’s a red sign. Well, so it’s a red circle with a number in the center and that’s the speed limit. Then we have a lot of indication type of signs and those are square blue signs. The background is blue and they have something white in the center. So if it’s a one way street, it’s this sign here.

If it’s a narrow bridge, for example, and one way has to give priority, this is the sign you will see. And whoever has the white goes first. If you have the red, you need to yield. And anyway, I mean, we do have a ton of signs in France. This is what my husband found startling, is like so many signs, how do you deal with this? But I guess, you know, to me it feels like America doesn’t have enough signs. So there you go.

Priority and Roundabouts

[00:18:06] Annie Sargent: Have you found it difficult to deal with roundabouts or right hand side priority?

[00:18:11] Matthew Gamache: So I’ve never really seen right hand side priority and I’m not sure, I haven’t seen it at all. Roundabouts are great. I have no issue with them. I wish we had more over here. I guess I’m kind of on the lookout for right hand side, because I feel that’s a pretty, that’s a situation where you’re most likely to get in an accident as an American, but I’ve still not seen it.

[00:18:34] Annie Sargent: Okay. So most roads, most of the traffic coming from your right, you need to yield to. That’s the basic rule, but..

[00:18:44] Matthew Gamache: If you’re coming in from the right, you have a yield sign and you have to yield.

[00:18:47] Annie Sargent: Meaning if I’m going straight, and a car coming from my right and there are no signs saying otherwise, the car coming from my right should have priority.

[00:18:57] Matthew Gamache: Correct. But every time I’ve seen it they have a yield sign.

[00:18:59] Annie Sargent: They have a yield sign. Exactly. More and more they’re putting a yield in there. The places where they don’t put a yield, it’s typically to slow people down. Because if they keep you on your toes, if somebody could come to your right and have priority at any moment, then you need to slow down and that’s why they do that. In my village, every time I exit my house, I’m on a dead end street and then there’s a little road where I have right hand side priority. Now, I’m not like gunning through this.

I just creep forward, and most people know that this is a right hand side priority and will stop and let me go. Some people don’t know. No big deal. I just stop and let them go. People are cautious around these right hand side priorities, and like you said, really, you can drive for a month in France and not see one. You know, it’s not really that big of a deal.

And the roundabouts, the important thing is pay attention to things coming from your left. My mother in law is a wonderful person, but she doesn’t like roundabouts, and so she asked me, how do you keep track?

You have to look everywhere. I’m like, no, no, on a roundabout, you don’t have to look everywhere. You just stop for cars coming from your left. That’s it.

Now we have the traditional roundabouts in large cities like Paris, where it’s still right hand side priority, which means that you have to yield to traffic coming from your right.

So in that case, you have priority when you enter the roundabout. And so like you enter here, as soon as another car comes, you have to let them go. And that, people get into all sorts of trouble in those things because we have very few of them left and most of them are in Paris. Do not drive in Paris.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know. Don’t drive in Paris. And as a rule, don’t drive in the cities.

Accommodations in France – in or outside of cities?

[00:20:49] Annie Sargent: So when you have had accommodations in France, do you mostly get accommodations outside of cities? In the cities? Or both?

[00:20:57] Matthew Gamache: When we build these itineraries, we try to mix it up. So sometimes we’re in rural areas for a while and sometimes we’re in a little bit more city center type place. And we also use trains strategically. For example, we have a trip coming up in a couple weeks where we’re going to be right in the center of Arcachon.

So we have a garage spot there. I know it’s not a city, but it’s going to be a densely packed area. So we’re going to have a garage spot there, and we’ll probably just leave the car there and go to the beach, and then we’re going to do a day trip to Bordeaux, which we’re going to use the train for. And then prior to that, we’re going to be in the Basque countryside. So we’ll be out in the rural areas, and then when we go to the Bayonne or whatever, we’ll drive there and park. We try to mix it up a little bit, so we’ve got some countryside experience, some more densely packed experience. And I think the key is when you’re going, is try to manage how you’re going to do cities, because you don’t want an itinerary where you’re like, I need to deal with the car in a big city halfway through, so just think it through and see what you can use the trains for.

Park and Ride if you can

[00:21:59] Annie Sargent: Yeah. So big cities in France try to discourage people from driving in the city center. They have been doing that for 10 years. They don’t want your car in the city center. So most places that have tram service or metro service, or even sometimes buses, they put a big parking lot at the end of the line. And that’s a ‘Park and Ride’ and they want people to park and then get on public transportation. And they make it very, very difficult to drive, especially in the hyper center of the city.

So like around Toulouse, Place du Capitole is a major street, and then you have perhaps a half a mile all the way around the Place du Capitole is the hypercenter. And there they have bollards that come up and down, and you can’t drive through them. The only people who have the right to drive through them are residents, who have a home right on those streets, and security and emergency vehicles. Taxis also have a way to lower the bollards, but Ubers do not. And if I’m driving someone to the city center, from what happened just a few weeks ago, I was picking up a customer for a day trip, and she was in the hyper city center, I couldn’t get to her street because of the bollards.

So I just said: ‘Oh, walk my way’ and she met me and it was fine. But, you know, even locals, I mean, I’m a local in France, I cannot drive in the city centers. So if your hotel or Airbnb is in the hyper city center, ask them, can I drive there? Can I park there? Because if you can’t, there’s nothing you can do about those bollards. You can sweet talk, talk to them all you want. It doesn’t work.

So that’s something you consider and so ‘Park and Ride’ if you can. You know, if you have a car, you drive yourself to the Park and Ride, you drop off your car, you go do your thing for the day. Arcachon is a bit different because it’s a smaller town, it’s a town that has mostly two main drags, you have along the road, and then coming inland a little bit, it’s a lovely town, really, it’s a wonderful place to spend a few days. Yeah, you’ll park and then walk the rest of the time, it’ll be just fine.

[00:24:15] Matthew Gamache: This is really one of the things I really love about traveling in France is that there’s so much to do and see in these smaller towns and the regions. For example, Beaune in Burgundy is a place where a lot of people go to, and a lot of tourists there, and we were there in July, and you could just get to the ring road and find a parking lot and park there, and it was easy.

That’s a lot easier to me than saying, if everything you want to see are in cities, going from city to city would be a lot more stressful to manage a car.

That’s one of the primary reasons why I like visiting France so much, is that you can see so much and do so many interesting things without the hassle of dealing with bigger cities.

[00:24:58] Annie Sargent: Yeah, there’s a lot, yeah, we have a lot of minor cities that are just fun to visit.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Driving on a freeway

[00:25:05] Annie Sargent: And if you do go through the freeways and if you just decide, you know, you could take the train, but if you decide, okay, I’m driving from, I don’t know, Lyon to Avignon, there is a freeway, freeways are good, they’re great.

But they’re not cheap. So if you want the price, if you want to know the price, you can go to ViaMichelin.fr, like a Michelin guide, .Fr, and then at the top, it says ‘Itinerary’, you click on that button and it will give you, you know, from here to here, and it will estimate the tolls that you’re going to pay for that trip, which is very helpful because the newer freeways are more expensive than the older freeways.

Some of the older freeways are free completely. Some are not. So you just need to be prepared. How have you thought about French freeways in general? Have you used them? Do you like them?

[00:26:00] Matthew Gamache: I use them every chance we have. I’ve never gotten off a freeway and said, man, that was a rip off. It was always fine.

I’ve had some very long drives off of the freeways where I wished there was a freeway, regardless of how much it cost. But no, I mean, I feel like the expectations are that they’re going to be expensive.

And I’ve always, I usually don’t use, I know I could, but I usually don’t prepare to that level, I just say, okay, I don’t know, it’s going to be 50 bucks or whatever to ride today. Then usually it’s less. And I’m usually surprised. It’s usually like $12 or something.

[00:26:33] Annie Sargent: Yeah. If you ride all day, if you drive all day, like if you go across the country and you drive all day, you’ll probably pay 50-60 Euros.

If you just go from town A to town B, it might be 15-20 or something like that. When I say expensive, I don’t mean it’s thousands of Euros, obviously it’s affordable for French people, so it’s affordable for visitors as well, but it will make your trip a little bit more expensive if you use them. Typically, you can double the price of the gas. And gas is not cheap in France either, right, compared to the US.

[00:27:06] Matthew Gamache: You know, this gets to kind of the, when you’re planning out your trip, what you’re deciding to do, I’ve done train only trips as well. I think that for me, now that we have four people it makes a lot, and we want to see countryside things, so we want to do kind of things off the beaten path, it makes a lot of sense, both economically and fun level to rent a car.

But when I was younger, train was definitely the way to go. There’s less of us. There’s only two of us traveling. You don’t have to deal with the stress of what to do with a car. And if you make an itinerary that makes sense, you can really go point to point via the trains pretty hassle free.

So, I’d say, when you’re planning a trip, think about what you want to do, and think about what also makes sense, and then websites like Via Michelin can help you with the budget planning.

(Mid-roll ad spot)

[00:27:49] Annie Sargent: Right.

Legal Requirements when driving in France

[00:27:49] Annie Sargent: So now there are some legal requirements and I’ve gotten to kind of discussions on Facebook with people about this. You are supposed to have a sticker on your car that it’s a 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4, it has to do with pollution levels. If you have an EV like me, it’s 0. If you have a small car that’s gasoline, it’s usually 1.

If it’s a little bit bigger car, or an older car, it might be a 2 or a 3. They restrict access to cities. Well, they’ve been threatening to restrict access to cities for all of these, but nobody is enforcing it yet. I have my 0 sticker on my car, my husband has his 1 sticker on his car, my daughter has her 2 sticker on her car, I used to have a 3 sticker on my diesel car, but most people don’t pay any attention to this or do anything with this. They’ve been hearing this for 10 years, but they just, somehow they go, Oh, I didn’t know about this. So, if your rental car doesn’t have the sticker on it, you don’t have to worry about it. Don’t go applying for a sticker for a car you’re just renting for two weeks.

It’s not a big deal. One day it will be strictly enforced, but we’re not there yet.

[00:29:10] Matthew Gamache: And when they get there, the rental car companies will be on top of it.

[00:29:13] Annie Sargent: Exactly.

[00:29:14] Matthew Gamache: So you don’t need to worry about it. I tend not to sweat those things. I just…

[00:29:17] Annie Sargent: And lots of people do. Like, lots of people just, they want to know the details of how do I get this sticker? I’m like, I have no idea. I mean, I got it because I live in France. I need it. But even I don’t need, nobody’s ever checked it. And eventually, we’ll all live in a world where the entrance to the cities will be metered and we’ll know, you know, what cars… It’s not like that yet.

Don’t worry about for now. It’s just fine.

Yellow Visibility Vests and breathalyzers

[00:29:42] Annie Sargent: The other thing that rental cars usually include is the high visibility yellow vests. You’re supposed to have one per person in your car. The rental car agency will put it in there. Breathalyzers for alcohol were mandatory for a short time, they’re not anymore.

Don’t drink and drive

[00:29:59] Annie Sargent: If you drink and drive, they’re not going to be pleasant about it. Okay? This is a case of we remove your car, we put you in jail, and you’ll be talking to the judge in the morning. Okay? Don’t do it! Do not do it!

[00:30:14] Matthew Gamache: I don’t mess around with that at all.

[00:30:15] Annie Sargent: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t do it.

[00:30:17] Matthew Gamache: Which is one of the great things about renting a house where you have a kitchen is that you can have nights where you have a bottle of wine and you don’t need to drive it home afterwards.

[00:30:26] Annie Sargent: And if you’re going to do wine tasting, and things like that, hire a guide that will take you around.

[00:30:32] Matthew Gamache: Mm hmm.

[00:30:32] Annie Sargent: You know, it’s not rocket science. You want to be able to enjoy your vacation, but if you’re going to be drinking, don’t plan on driving.

[00:30:41] Matthew Gamache: Can I just go over a couple things that I do when I’m preparing for a trip with expected driving? So, as I noted, you want to kind of integrate your car rental plans into your overall itinerary and make sure makes sense, you know, you don’t want to pick up a car in Western France and then have your Paris stop be right in the middle and then go somewhere else because you need to figure out how this makes sense and how you’re going to deal with the car.

So, that’s fairly obvious. I think we all know you want to avoid dropping off a car in a different country from where you pick up. That fee is exorbitant, sometimes over 1000$. So, that’s, will oftentimes shape what you do for your whole trip.

Don’t book your trip and then be surprised later that you’re going to have to pay this extra fee. So, be on top of that.

Avoid traveling north to south mid July to September on Saturdays.

[00:31:26] Annie Sargent: Yes.

[00:31:27] Matthew Gamache: That could pretty much change your whole perspective on driving.

[00:31:30] Annie Sargent: Yes.

[00:31:31] Matthew Gamache: I’ve only got caught in a little bit of it. It was one Saturday we were driving from like Narbonne to Perpignan and I got a little taste of that traffic.

But I’ve heard it’s bad.

[00:31:41] Annie Sargent: It’s bad. Yeah. So long weekends, we have a service called Bison Futé. Bison Futé is the smart bison, don’t ask me. Smart bison tells us when, oh, and we should not drive. But we all know what it is. If the long weekend starts on a Thursday night, between Thursday night and Friday noon, roads are going to be packed.

Coming back, same thing. If it ends on a Sunday, that Sunday night roads are going to be packed.

If you can avoid driving on those days, you’d be better off. But by now there’s traffic, like on Google or Waze, it will tell you, like, if you tell it, I’m driving to this place, it’s going to say, don’t.

[00:32:24] Matthew Gamache: Right. But this all comes when you’re putting together your itinerary, if you have choices, you know, maybe don’t book that, book your Provence trip to start on, you know, August 1st, Saturday, following your time in Paris.

[00:32:39] Annie Sargent: Yes.

[00:32:39] Matthew Gamache: That’s going to be a long, a long day.

[00:32:42] Annie Sargent: Yes, yes, yes.

[00:32:44] Matthew Gamache: Maybe you take the train.

Yes, when French people go on vacation, they all go on vacation.

[00:32:50] Annie Sargent: The calendar rules our lives. So if it’s vacation time, everybody’s leaving.

Join Us in France episode 16

[00:32:56] Annie Sargent: Review episode 16 of Join Us in France. It is still the most comprehensive discussion of driving in France that I’ve encountered since it was out in 2015, or whatever.

Yeah.

[00:33:08] Matthew Gamache: It is great. It just lays out everything that you’re going to encounter in France, a lot of which we’ve already talked about today, speed traps, parking, all of that.

Just get the international driver’s permit, costs you 20 bucks. I know there’s debate about whether you actually need it, but why bother even debating it? It’s 20.

It’s a sunk cost.

[00:33:25] Annie Sargent: Yeah it’s 20 bucks, but if you don’t have it, if you forgot to ask for it and you don’t have it, don’t worry, you know, nobody’s ever asked me for one in France or anywhere.

[00:33:33] Matthew Gamache: Me neither, but I just figure it’s just part of the cost of the trip for me.

[00:33:37] Annie Sargent: Yeah.

[00:33:37] Matthew Gamache: And one thing I do that is a little different, is on the first day, I’m really not that excited about driving long distances after my plane lands, and I’m coming from Boston, which is, you know, as close as can be pretty much.

I know a lot of people come from California or have more jet lag than I do, so I like to kind of keep the first day as manageable as possible. And one thing I do, is I go on Google Maps and kind of virtually do that drive. So there’s no surprises. I know that seems like kind of a pain and maybe overkill, but for me if I’m going to be tired and stuff, I just want to know, what’s tricky about this?

What am I going to encounter that might be like, Oh, no, I don’t, I don’t get it. For the rest of the trip, no problem, but I just try to manage that first time. Yeah I mean,

[00:34:21] Annie Sargent: You drop the little guy and click, click, click? My husband does that too, but I thought he was the only one who did this, but he this real comfortable driving places he doesn’t know. So I guess that’s why.

[00:34:33] Matthew Gamache: Especially on that first day because there’s like, airports are kind of weird. I mean, they’re fine, they’re easy, but they’ve kind of got their own little nuances about how to get into and out of the airport, and then how you get on the airport to the highway, and, you know, all those little things that I just like to kind of…

[00:34:49] Annie Sargent: See it.

[00:34:50] Matthew Gamache: See it and have some comfort that I know what I’m going to encounter.

[00:34:54] Annie Sargent: That’s a very good point.

Parking Tips

[00:34:56] Annie Sargent: About parking, I would say that if you are going to be staying somewhere a long time, like a day, or two, if your accommodation doesn’t have parking, make sure there’s no fee, like, you know, don’t park somewhere where you go feed the meter off.

I mean, that’s so obvious, but there are places where they really don’t want you to stay more than two or three hours. And as a matter of fact, you’ll see it because when the parking meter goes over a certain time, so you’re paying 2.50 Euro, 2.45 Euro, you know how you increase the time and it gives you more. All of a sudden, you go over two hours and it’s like 50 bucks, you know.

Yeah. And so, oh, okay, they really don’t want me to stay more than two hours here. That’s how they deal with it. Just don’t. Yeah, don’t.

If you can go to a parking garage underground, or even above ground, but like a parking garage, then you just pay for however long you stay.

How to pay for Park and Ride in France

[00:35:53] Annie Sargent: And if you can do a park and ride, then you’ll just use your metro ticket or your tram ticket to exit for free. And in Toulouse, I do this, you know, so when you enter the park and ride, it will make you take a ticket, most of the time. You save that ticket, and when you come out to be a two hours later, nine hours later, whatever it is, you put that ticket in and it says, you’ve been here this amount of time, it’ll cost you X amount of money.

You take your Metro ticket, you put it in, zero, it goes to zero, because you’re a rider.

[00:36:32] Matthew Gamache: Interesting. I haven’t done one of those yet, so maybe on this trip we will.

[00:36:36] Annie Sargent: Right. right, Yeah.

So just, you know, that’s just how it’s supposed to work. They put barriers at the entrance because they don’t want people parking, I don’t know if they’re going to, if there’s a hospital nearby or if there’s… you know, a shopping center nearby.

They want just people who are riding the metro or the tram, to go into the city. So that’s why they put barriers, but you don’t need to pay the money. It will just, your proof that you just used the metro. So it cannot be the metro ticket that you use that morning. It’s the one that you use to come back with.

[00:37:12] Matthew Gamache: Right, yeah.

[00:37:13] Annie Sargent: That will let you off for free.

[00:37:15] Matthew Gamache: Really good to know.

I found, I think based on your advice, if in doubt, just use a underground garage. If you’re concerned about, you know, is this a good spot, you know, is it… people try to steal stuff out of my car, whatever, just to get the underground garage and pay for it.

[00:37:31] Annie Sargent: Yes. And by the way breaking into cars to steal stuff rarely happens. It’s very unusual. Like, I’m not saying it’s never going to happen, and if you are going from town to town and you have all your stuff with you, I would put all my valuables in a small bag or a backpack or something and take it with me when I go in to visit the chateau, the whatever.

But it’s not a problem most places, okay? That visitors go. I don’t know. Have you ever been worried about the safety of your stuff on a trip?

[00:38:04] Matthew Gamache: Well, before we started driving, it was a concern, but based on my experiences, no. I mean, we usually have travel days where we stop. I think in, when we did our first trip in 2015, we’d have travel days and we’d be like, okay, we’re not going to stop because we got all our stuff and it’ll be complicated.

But after seeing it, I’m not concerned anymore.

[00:38:24] Annie Sargent: Right.

[00:38:24] Matthew Gamache: Just make sure you just make smart decisions. Don’t park in like, a end alley and then go away for four hours, you know, use parking garage, you know.

[00:38:33] Annie Sargent: The parking garages are watched. There’s cameras everywhere. That dissuades a lot of, you know, theft, like that. And also if you take your wallet, your phone, most people don’t want your dirty laundry.

[00:38:47] Matthew Gamache: Especially if you’re going to a, like a tourist attraction like Pont du Gard or other places where we stoped, I mean it’s perfectly safe.

[00:38:55] Annie Sargent: It’s fine. It’s fine.

Parking discs

[00:38:56] Annie Sargent: So of parking time, sometimes you have the blue zones in cities. So this is in minor cities, smaller cities, you park into an area where you have blue lines painted. And what they want is they want you to put in a time thing, and it’s that thing, it’s a little disc and it says I arrived at…2. Because then it’s free for two hours.

Normally your car will have that. Or you can put a note. It’s very rare that they enforce this on rental cars. If you don’t make it a habit to park there for five hours, when you’re only supposed to be there for two, you probably won’t get a ticket anyway.

[00:39:39] Matthew Gamache: Yeah, I had a pretty fun conversation with a boulangerie owner about this on our first trip, because I didn’t understand the free part of it, so I was trying to figure out, of course, I was only parked for like 15 minutes, but I’m like, I don’t know, how do I pay? I went in and I was like asking how do I pay for the spot?

And she brought out the wheel, and she’s speaking French and I’m doing my best, but… And then she got someone else to come over and explain that to me and put on the wheel and I’m like, okay, I get that. But like, how do I pay? but eventually they were all like, ah, it doesn’t matter.

[00:40:14] Annie Sargent: They really want to get people who abuse the thing, but if you’re only going to be there for 15, 20 minutes, it’s not a big deal. I’m in Spain right now and I have installed, most cities have a parking app and so I installed the parking app for the city where I am.

And every time I go to the beach, I open my app, so you have to tell it what part, you know, what area along the beach you’re at. And you say, Oh, so you authorize for nine hours of parking. Like I’m going to stay at the beach for nine hours, but whatever. You authorize that, and then I come back and I say, okay, I’m driving off now.

And it has always been zero. So it’s been free every time. It’s only June, so maybe they make you pay later in the year or maybe weekend. I’m not sure what the rules are. I don’t even need to know because I set up the app and I just say, you know, I’m here and I’ve left and they will charge my, but of course I had to set up the app, I had to put my credit card. You have to put a picture of your car in there. You have to give your license plate. But even if you go pay for a little two hour thing, usually they want your license plate on the parking, on the metering. So take a picture of your, whatever license you have.

[00:41:35] Matthew Gamache: That’s a great point. As soon as you get your car, take a picture of the license plate so that you can remember it in case you need it.

[00:41:40] Annie Sargent: Yeah. Yeah. Cause you will need it to park most places. And machines to pay for parking are sometimes like, what does it want? That’s why I installed the app, honestly.

These machines that speak Catalan to me, and I know I can put it in French or Spanish, but sometimes even finding the other languages is confusing.

The rest stops are great in France

[00:42:02] Matthew Gamache: One thing that’s different, that I find different if you’re going on a road trip in America versus in France, and I’ve said this on a couple different podcasts, is that the rest stops are amazing in France.

[00:42:13] Annie Sargent: Yes.

[00:42:14] Matthew Gamache: They have good food, easy parking, great facilities, usually comes with some sort of regional themed gift shop, sometimes they have a park or a playground, sometimes they have hotels, they really are… I find them to be a kind of tourist attraction in and of themselves. I haven’t seen that in Italy or other places, as much, I think this is a French thing,

[00:42:36] Annie Sargent: Yeah, in Spain, they’re not great. Some of them are better than others, but they’re not great. And the other thing you find in France at those big rest areas is high voltage, fast chargers for electric cars. Every one of them has them. So that’s, I can stop anywhere.

You know, I can, I don’t have to plan my trip. I can just say I’m at 30, I need to stop and charge. Whichever the next one is, I don’t even need to know. It doesn’t matter. I just, I will go there, plug in. It’ll charge. I’ll go.

[00:43:06] Matthew Gamache: And this is helpful, you know, you’re paying for the tolls, and part of that goes to, I think, having good rest stops. If you’re planning a big drive day, which we have on several occasions, it’s just nice to be able to say, we’ll just have lunch here, we don’t, I mean, it’s nice to go visit small towns, but, it’s going to take an hour, it’s going to add an hour to your day to get off and pick a restaurant, sit down and do all that stuff.

If you know that the rest stop is going to have pretty decent food, it’s just worked for us. It’s been very convenient.

[00:43:31] Annie Sargent: It’s cafeteria food usually. You know you will have a cafeteria style thing, you will have sandwiches, you will have chips, you will have drinks, you will have coffees. For some reason, I love the tomato soup at those rest stops. When they have the tomato soup, like the distributors, they give you coffee.

Some of them give you tomato soup and I always get that.

I like it.

[00:43:51] Matthew Gamache: I love a cafeteria meal.

[00:43:52] Annie Sargent: Me too.

Driver Behavior

[00:43:53] Annie Sargent: The last thing I want to bring up is the driver behavior, driver attitudes. You’ve kind of touched on it, but how have you found it in France?

Again, I’m not an expert, but I’ve had, not only have I had no issues, I’ve found people to be pretty polite. And what I mean by polite is that I don’t get tail, I haven’t gotten tailgated. Granted, I’m going on a trip in like two weeks, so maybe I’ll eat my words and maybe it’ll completely different.

But, so I don’t want to jinx it, but so far I haven’t been tailgated, people pass on the left, religiously. So as long as you stay in the right lane until you want to pass, you’re good. People don’t run red lights and I think it’s because they know they’re going to get a ticket, it’s my understanding. So no running of red lights. Bike lanes are a little bit better, or at least they have been. Maybe they’ve even gotten better in terms of being separated from traffic and in town areas.

Some places are better than others.

[00:44:44] Matthew Gamache: Yeah. So in terms of like road disagreements, I’ve had good experience in France.

I think I’ve only got honked at twice and both times it was my fault.

[00:44:54] Annie Sargent: I get honked at on occasion, you know, because I’m not paying attention, because whatever, like, it’s fine. It’s fine. There’s no, there’s typically no road rage. I mean…

Pedestrians should look both ways before stepping onto the pavement

[00:45:06] Annie Sargent: There’s got to be some crazy drivers in France, of course, but mostly you don’t see it. You should be careful though when stepping into the pavement, they’re not great at stopping for pedestrians, and I see this because in Spain they’re so much better. In Spain you approach a pedestrian crossing, the car stops.

[00:45:26] Matthew Gamache: Okay.

[00:45:26] Annie Sargent: In France you can be two, three steps into the pedestrian crossing and you’re not sure the car it’s going to stop. We need to improve on that. Be careful with bikes, quiet bikes are deadly. Look both ways before you step onto the road is always good.

But generally it’s… it’s pretty easy.

In rural areas you don’t need to go as fast as the speed limit

[00:45:42] Matthew Gamache: another thing that I found is that, if you think, if the speed limit’s 80, and you’re not comfortable doing that, it’s fine. Don’t just say, oh, I’m going too slow. I don’t think you have to say I’m going too slow. I need to go 80 because some of it’s a little tricky. And I think when you get, you get into these towns and the roads were designed, you know, hundreds of years ago, and you have buildings that are like just right at the road, just go slow.

If you don’t know what’s around the corner, just go slow.

[00:46:11] Annie Sargent: Especially in the Vaucluse, in these really nice touristy areas, you have these roads where officially it’s 80, but it’s like windy, windy, windy, and you don’t know what’s coming. And I don’t drive 80 on those. I go a little slower.

That’s fine. That’s fine.

There’s no trouble for going slower than you have to.

Night time driving

[00:46:29] Matthew Gamache: Yeah, I should know another thing that I’ve kind of avoided over the trips is driving at night. So people might have different experiences if they drive at night. I think for the most part, we’re not really into the night events as much, so we pretty much settled in by the time dinner time comes around.

So that might provide some more stress.

[00:46:49] Annie Sargent: Yeah.

[00:46:49] Matthew Gamache: That I haven’t really experienced. Although this trip, we are going to be able to go out a couple more times. The kids are getting older.

[00:46:55] Annie Sargent: Well, I know you’re well prepared and you have experience, so you’ll have a fantastic time, but thank you for sharing your experiences because it’s really important and just have your mind at ease, to hear from people who have done it. A lot of people tell me they’re scared to drive in France.

I don’t think there’s any reason to be scared to drive in France. If you can drive in American cities, you can drive in France.

[00:47:18] Matthew Gamache: I think so.

[00:47:18] Annie Sargent: It’s not that different. It’s really not different. It’s just, take it easy and enjoy your trip. Don’t rush, don’t speed, don’t speed, don’t drink and drive, you know, normal stuff that are important anywhere.

All right, Matthew, thank you so much for talking to me again on this episode and have a wonderful time in Arcachon and in the Basque country.

Beautiful place.

[00:47:42] Matthew Gamache: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

[00:47:43] Annie Sargent: All right. Au revoir.

[00:47:45] Matthew Gamache: Bye.

Thank You Patrons

[00:47:46] Annie Sargent: Again, I’d like to thank you all for supporting the show. Some of you have been doing it for many years now, you are fantastic. A special shout out this week to our new Join Us in France champions, Diana, Deborah Swindlehurst, Elena Sweeney from the Bootcamp, Jennifer Peterson, Amber Brown, SonmaGal, Kathy, Erica Davis, Jennifer Vionito, Don Fairchild, who is an ‘Ambassador du Podcast’ and upgraded to yearly, which I love, you know, when people sign up for the yearly, because then I know I can count on their support for a whole year, which is wonderful.

Dawn also sends me really good marketing suggestions because she has a brain for that. And I do not, merci, Dawn, merci. And I should mention that you get 16% off when you choose yearly. So it’s a win-win.

Would you join them too? Go to patreon.com/JoinUs, and to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/ElysArt.

And remember, Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready and ads free.

This weekend, I’ll have my Zoom with patrons. As always, I shared three different times to suit patrons in different time zones. One Saturday night, one Sunday morning, and one Sunday night.

Now that’s France time, obviously, because that’s where I am. And I don’t know where you are. So you have to pick which one works for you. I really enjoyed chatting with my patrons, so I hope to see you there.

Thank you, Julie Weiss

[00:49:32] Annie Sargent: And thank you Julie Weiss for sending in a tip with a note that says” ‘a very late thank you for the wonderful experience of bootcamp in May. I am still basking in the joy I had during all the trips, and gatherings, and laughter. It was really a fabulous experience and I hope to do it again. Merci beaucoup, Julie.’

Thank you, Julie. It would be an honor and a joy to have you again. And it was indeed a very wonderful time.

Yes, you can tip in France!

[00:50:00] Annie Sargent: And for those of you who hesitate about tipping, let me say this. It is never wrong to tip a waiter, or an Uber driver, or a taxi driver, or the person who cleans your room, or your hairdresser, or even the person who gives you a tour. Tips are a wonderful way to say thank you for a great service and very much appreciated. Merci.

If you’re planning a trip to France and have questions that didn’t get answered in an episode of the podcast, you can hire me to be your itinerary consultant.

I offer two levels of itinerary consultations, Bonjour and VIP. You can read all of that at joinusinfrance.com/boutique and follow the instructions. Some people get confused by the fact that the payments go through PayPal. You do not need to create a PayPal account to buy any of my services.

It’s just that PayPal handles the credit card information. So you’re making a regular credit card payment, but PayPal handles the safety stuff. I could be doing the same thing with a regular bank, but it’s just easier internationally to do it with PayPal. I may change that someday, but for now, that’s how I do it.

Self-guided Tours of Paris

[00:51:08] Annie Sargent: And if you don’t need a one on one consultation, you can still take me in your pocket with my self-guided tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app. I write these tours to lead you to the best of Paris. I have tours of the Eiffel Tower, Le Marais, Montmartre, the Latin Quarter, Île de la Cité, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and my latest baby, of course, the food tour around Les Halles.

The idea is that I guide you to some of the best food in Les Halles with VoiceMap to just show you the way. And when you get there, I explain what you’re looking at, and how to decide what to get. Instead of being a canned experience where the tour guide and the owner decides what you’re going to taste, I give you the knowledge you need to make your own choices.

And what you learn is something that you can extrapolate to any market in France, so I think it’s better.

Reviews

[00:51:59] Annie Sargent: Someone left this review of my Montmartre tour this week. Super tour. It gave us the chance to walk at our own pace and it was very enjoyable and informative. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to use the app or mess things up, but it was very user friendly and I had a lovely day and tour. Would definitely recommend it.

Well, thank you. Yes, you cannot mess it up. It’s meant for people who are not very techie and it works very, very well.

Swimming in Seine

[00:52:24] Annie Sargent: Swimming in the Seine. Yes, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, swam in the Seine this week, as it is now safe. As explained before, the reason why it hasn’t been possible so far, despite considerable investments in water reclamation systems that were very much needed for the Paris region, it would have been a very bad idea until the last few days because it had been raining too much.

Thankfully, the rain has stopped, so the water reclamation efforts are working as intended. The French sports minister was the first one to do it a few days ago, the mayor of Paris, now, lots of Olympic official joined her. So, it’s entirely possible that the long distance swimming events will take place in the Seine after all.

Emmanuel Macron, the president, said he would do it and he might still, you know, there’s time. I mean, he has other fish to fry, I’m sure, but he could use with a bit of… a lighthearted event, huh? It would be pretty good, I think.

Paris was hoping for a tourism gold rush, thanks to the Olympics, and it might be that the opposite has happened, we’ll see at the end of it, but it’s not looking great.

I already told you that it’s been raining a lot in Paris, and that never helps tourism anywhere. Then you have the increased prices that are happening everywhere, but some hotels got greedy, you know, that’s just a fact. So in July, 2023, 90% of rooms were full in Paris. And in July, 2024, only 79% of rooms are booked.

What happened? Well, lots of things, transportation problems, road gridlock because of Paris 2024 lanes all over the capital reserved to cars that have credentials and nobody else, not even bicycles. You need a pass just to walk along the river and that starts today. And if you want to figure out what this pass is all about, you can go to joinusinfrance.com/GamePass. I wrote a short blog post about how this works with a link to how to get the pass. It’s pretty easy, just say you’re a tourist and they’ll let you have it. They made it difficult for people who work in the area, but for the tourist, all you have to say is, Oh, I want to go to the Louvre or whatever.

And also you have to think, tour operators, you know, normally when you operate a tour, which I do for the bootcamp, well you need to be sure what time your bus is going to show up, what time your group is going to be able to arrive at a specific destination. Timing is very important for a group activity, and if you don’t know if your bus is going to be able to make it, you just don’t organize a tour, you know, you just go somewhere else. And there are lots of places in France where you could go, although most are not as much in demand as Paris, but I think, you know, they probably got lots of people who normally do whole buses of people not coming this year because of the Olympics and that really adds up fast. I really think also that the demand for Airbnb in Paris has doubled year over year. And I think what’s happening is that hotels in Paris are not doing a great job at satisfying the needs of families.

By that I mean families need to be sure that they can get two rooms, three rooms at a reasonable price. They should get a discount for the second and third room, and they normally don’t. They need to be assured that these rooms are going to be very close together, because if you have a seven year old and a nine year old in the room across the hall, you want to be sure that they’re not going to be on a different floor, you know, that sort of thing.

And hotels in general, and in Paris in particular, don’t do a very good job about that. Families also need a place where they can do some quick cooking. Like if you have a kid, lots of kids are picky eaters or impatient at restaurants, you need to be able to feed some of the meals at your accommodations.

Hotels haven’t caught up with that. Like they just don’t offer that. And so even people who are against the whole idea of Airbnb, and they know that it increases prices, blah, blah, blah, that it makes it harder for locals to find long term rentals, well, it’s still so much better than getting two or three hotel rooms in Paris that they go ahead and book an Airbnb. So I think hotels need to improve their offerings as well.

So, in the end, Paris will have a lot of diehard Olympic fans. Great people. These people attend events, no matter where they take place in the world, they have tickets to many events. They’ll mostly spend their time attending events, which is fantastic. And I very much look forward to watching the Olympics on TV. And I’ll be there in person for a week to enjoy the Paralympics. I hope by then things will have calmed down, but I’ll still get to enjoy the feel of the Olympics.

And I have a future daughter in law she participates in, HandiSport is what it’s called, she’s a wheelchair racer and she aspires to being an Olympian. She’s close. She’s close. She might do it for the next one. We’ll see. So, you know… to me, that’s really important as well, and I think it’s fantastic to see all the ways that people that have physical challenges can participate and can do amazing things. And if we think about it, we all…

I’m very, very much handicapped when it comes to a lot of physical things, you know, I can’t run, I, well, I can, but I don’t. There are a lot of things we have to be realistic, we all have limitations and it’s great to see people of all abilities work very hard to do great things.

French Politics

[00:58:23] Annie Sargent: The new French parliament votes to promote some members to leadership positions today. We don’t have the results yet, but things are moving along. There’s a big discussion on whether you should include people who are of, you know, extreme political parties, be they left or right, to participate in leadership positions.

I think if they got themselves elected, then they should have some leadership positions, but you know, nobody asked me. President Macron hasn’t decided on a prime minister or cabinet members yet, because, as I mentioned, parliament can easily be tossed out, so whoever he chooses, he needs to find people who are likely to suit a majority of parliamentarians and will stay in place long enough to get some things done.

He cannot call for new snap elections for another year. So if all we do all year is, Oh, here’s the cabinet I would like, Oh, we don’t, we hate them, boom, start over again, and again and again, and again. We could do this, like we could spend the whole year doing nothing but that. So hopefully they won’t do that.

And hopefully, he will choose, well I hope, this is what I hope, I think you should choose a group of youngish, meaning 30s, 40s, 50s, technocrats, you know, people who can do the math, run a tight ship without strong political leanings.

Nobody is exempt from political leanings, I’m sure, but there are plenty of people who don’t think their political choices define them, and that that’s what they need to put forward first. These are the people who work behind the scenes, they do the research, they present conclusions, they don’t talk to the press.

They don’t try to make a name for themselves. That would be really refreshing because in France, we’re really good at producing politicians who behave like know it alls. For the time being, the previous cabinet is taking care of business and they’ll continue to do that until after the Olympics. This matters a lot because they participated in all the preparations for the Olympics, and should anything go wrong, it’s vital to have people who have experience and will know what to do quickly.

So, wait and see for now. Things have calmed down. Everyone seems to have accepted that we’re in a wait and see phase, and that’s how it’s going to be.

My thanks to podcast editors Anne and Cristian Cotovan who produced the transcripts.

Next week on the podcast, an episode with Elyse about the best of the Aveyron department in Occitanie, a gorgeous place of France that I think you’ll love. Elyse and I both love it. I think you’ll love it too.

And remember, Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready and ads free, you can join for as little as two bucks a month. Why don’t you do that? Follow the link in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together.

Au revoir!

Copyright

[01:01:21] Annie Sargent: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and Copyright 2024 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.

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