Driving in France and our arrival to LE PUY

Steve and I have successfully rented/driven cars on many of our abroad trips. We had one small encounter in Italy and I am not certain I would ever rent in Italy again.... But we have had great luck none the less. Thinking back I'm not certain I have actually sat in the drivers seat for any of those situations. Cars are stick shift which I have always preferred and one must remember that the gas is Diesel.

I worried if I would beable to start the engines and leave the Paris airport successfully this trip. Maybe I should admit that worry was justified for about my first five minutes as I was real rusty with a stick shift, couldn't figure out how to put it in reverse and was almost frozen to move the car out of its original parking spot in a dark underground garage at the Paris airport. Thankfully a lovely French family saw my situation (remember it was 0630 in the AM having just completed a transatlantic flight) and the hubby offered to help. There was a things on the stick shift that you had to pull up to go into reverse, not certain I remember  such a thing, but I'd still be there if he didn't help me.

Thankfully he stuck around to see me freeze and stall attempting to get out. However once out of the confinement of the garage it all clicked and we were rolling! It quickly came back to me that France has tolls and I felt like  every few minutes I was handing out money to a machine. One of my machines appeared not to work and a huge line appeared behind me as I had to press a button for an attendant. Some machines you take a ticket to be told what you owe at the next kiosk down the road, but some just tell you how much to pay on the screen. Like a lab rat I was trained to get my ticket, so when this machine didn't give me a ticket I thought it was broken, it just wanted me to feed it a credit card. So I provided some entertainment within one hour of arrival....

But don't count me out, I got my driving groove down quickly after that and once Reichen figured out how to turn off the toll option on the GPS we were golden!

We played around with the GPS a bit and many times the toll road would have only saved us about five minutes an hour.

So I have given it some thought, could anyone who drives in the States drive here in France? I actually think the driving here is very easy. The use of roundabouts and the GPS makes it almost impossible to not figure out where to go...

Fast forward to yesterday. We have accumulated a good 15 plus pounds of rocks, faces, a heart... Many that the children live and refuse to part with. My parents have dear friends in Chavaniac, that I was under the impression that it was near Le Puy , our Camino start location. We had been in contact for about 24 hours on a safe pass off of the rocks so they would be held onto until we return post Camino in November. Yesterday as we were saying bye to our safe and sweet boating hamlet we hopped in the car and put our friends address in the GPS, they were about ten hours from us, a distance I was not expecting. I then put in Le Puy and it was alittle less than five hours away. We were so excited as we would be approaching Le Puy at seven to eight PM, a perfect amount of time to socialize with pilgrims and walk around.

On the drive we saw this sign and stopped for our mandatory picnic...

 We drove through miles of gorgeous woods and were so eager of our arrival. Reichen commented that he was surprised by the lack of signs, or more so how humble and simple they were. Here when you approach a town its name is clearly on a sign , and as you leave the exact sign is present with a line through it. Here we were with the sign saying we have arrived to " Le Puy", we were between stone homes built near to threat so I just assumed when we made the right around the building there would be a whole world of pilgrims and churches.... Five houses later there was a sign for " Le Puy" with a cross through it meaning we were leaving it about as quickly as we arrived to it. I instantly realized we were at the wrong "Le Puy", our destination was Le Puy-en-Velay and the days confusion over my parents friends home being so far away and our Le Puy being so close now made sense. Not having WIFI but in the most limited is settings has taken its toll. I knew Le Puy went as " Le Puy en Velay" but I guess when putting it into the GPS I wasn't thinking about this.

We still had FIVE hours to drive, the energy in the car crashed, the girls flooded me with questions not totally grasping the situation and I just about cried right then and there. Needing to keep morale high we kicked up the tunes , ate chocolate and encouraged the little ones to fall asleep...

 Five kilometers from our destination we woke everyone up and were super thrilled to see this...