Road Trip!

This past week family members started to pour into CDG to start their vacations (which I'm just about to join after finishing these blogs) and Sunday marked my grandparents departure from Paris in a rental car. One small issue. Or maybe a lot of them. Driving in Paris is hard, and my grandparents can't speak French. Finding traffic lights alone has been a struggle for me, but with persistance and many, many horns honked at me on my scooter, I mastered their locations as I have every late night bar and police checkpoint (those may or may not be mutually exclusive). In anyway, I was hired as the cheuffeur out to Tours (a city that I had previously been to earlier this week). Apart from waking up at the ungodly hour of 9am after a Saturday night and mini-celebration of completion of work, the drive wasn't too bad. I also had to make a couple stops at some slightly out-of-reach châteaux, which provided some break time and the slight urge to want to hurl myself off of the towers as to never see any more châteaux ever again (that is, unless I'm living in one because my extremely wealthy fiancée happened to aquire it after her father, the distant relative of the former Duke of Orléans passed away).

Things were going quite swimmingly, until a checkpoint at the toll booth waved me over. Firstly, the gendarme was standing in the middle of the road. I had either the option to out maneuver him or run him over. I quickly ruled out those options. My panic was rooted in my and my grandfather's unwillingness to pay the extra €35 a day for insurance so I could drive the car. I figured I could always use the "he's old and doesn't know French excuse" but to convey that with justification would have broken the cardinal rule of getting pulled over in France: "pretend to not speak French." Quite the conundrum. Luckily enough it was a random survey on sleep habits (well I guess not so lucky since I had to answer sleep and drinking pattern questions in front of my grandparents—in English nonetheless because I tried to worm my way out of it by claiming that I didn't speak French). I guess there is some lesson on honestly in there somewhere, but I was too drunk/tired to figure it out.