France Part Deux

neotoma and I got up early on the Wednesday, found a way to extract our tickets from the kiosks and went from Paris Montparnasse to Toulouse Matabiau. Once there we picked up our very small car.

It took a few minutes for me to realize that I kept putting the car into third gear rather than first, but after the first hour, the fact that it had been 30+ years since I'd driven stick shift wasn't a huge problem. However, I will say that if I see one more traffic circle, I may burst into tears.

Getting out of Toulouse was one traffic circle after another. Then we hit the country roads. First of all, I would like to say that the Dordogne is every bit as beautiful as everyone says. We had glorious sunny weather as we hit the lovely vistas of plowed and planted fields with hills, forest, and poplar wind breaks everywhere we looked.

On the other hand, neotoma learned that I will swear at the car if it's not cooperating (see the 3rd gear vs 1st gear issue), and we both learned that the Dordogne has more hills and curves than the average roller coaster. The posted speed limit for most of it -- unless we were actually going through one of the beautiful 16th or 17th century towns -- was 80 kph (~50 mph). There was no way that I could handle any car at that speed on narrow roads with no shoulders and more curves than Marilyn Monroe. At one point on our second or third day of driving, we actually cheered because we'd finally found a road wide enough to have lane markings.

We found a decent hotel for Wednesday evening, but had some upset because the GPS on neotoma's phone still said we were 2 hours away from Lascaux. It had told us we were 2.5 hours from Lascaux when we first got in the car and we'd been driving for three hours.

The hoteliers told us we were only about 30 minutes away, which proved reasonably accurate when we left the next day. It was a great relief.