You Can't Get There From Here

I love France and the cities that we have seen with their unique statues and buildings and the atmosphere that comes with centuries of history, but when it comes to driving someplace, you can't get there from here. There are a great number of impediments to driving to a certain destination in any city in France. The first problem is that there are not a lot of street signs except at major intersections and so when you want to make sure you are on the right street to arrive at your destination it is very easy to miss a turn that you should have taken.

Which way? They are both one-way!!

Now you have a major problem to back track to get to where you just made the wrong turn. In the United States you just go around the block and voila you have it made. Not in France. All the streets go off on angles and so you might have to travel many blocks to try to get back where you made the wrong turn. That problem is compounded by the fact that there are so many one way streets that when you turn to go back the best way possible you end up facing a one way sign. There have been many times when we have had to back up because we assumed that the street would take us close to where we wanted to go, only to face the one way sign. Twice we just pressed forward on the one way street and turned off on the first intersection, no matter which way it directed us. We were lucky both time that there was no traffic coming the other way and the intersection was a short way off, and of course it was another one way street going the wrong direction and we ended up a long way from our hopeful arrival point.

Streets on angles.

The last problem is that our GPS that we brought only works in the United States and its territories and though France would like to annex the U.S., we won't be one of their territories any time soon (we could make France one of our territories). Back home our GPS would talk to us and give us plenty of warning of things to come and directions to take. Our GPS here is called Mappy and unlike the female voice of ours back home, this one doesn't talk, but by its actions your mother is certain it is a male. It, like us, gets confused with one way streets and then takes forever to recalculate and by then we are further into the abyss of the French maze of city streets. Your mother feels that it has a male mentality when it has to recalculate in that it doesn't ask direction so therefore it take a long time in getting its bearings.

The freeway system here is very well planned and laid out, but once again Mappy waits until the last moment to indicate the turn off we should take and so we have spent time going down the freeway to the next turn off so we can turn around. Joanne is learning to anticipate Mappy by checking the distance in meters to the next turn off, but in some cases there are multiple turn exits close together and so here again we end up going to the next exit so we can turn around.

One benefit of living in the mountains back home is that they can give you instant direction points of reference. Here the city is built on flat land and we have had to pick out references points to go by. We started with church steeples until we found out very quickly that the steeples are all designed the same way and all but one was built out of the same colored stone. With that idea gone, we started to look for the city hall clock tower. It is very high and near our home, so it became a major land mark for us. In Lille we noticed that the many modern buildings in the newer area of town are different colors, so that helps us to get our bearings.

4 one-way streets around a church square.

We have found our way easier here in Lille with a total population of 4 million that we did in Angouleme, but we haven't started to really get to the members that are less active and we must admit that even with Mappy's male attitude we have really needed him on several occasions.