Day 9 Medieval Klohs Encounters

Day 9 Thurs. Oct. 23, 2008

Today we again got a rather late start. Have I yet said we had an early start? Hmmmm.....

I have a book entitled “Provence”.

In it are a series of itineraries of sights to see and things to do.

The 1st picture in this book is a map of South Eastern France.

On this map, a large arrow points almost exactly to the area surrounding Jausiers.

What is misleading about this map and it's compatriots in the book is the total lack of representation of driving time necessary to get from one dot to another.

The dots look so close, there must be –what- 20 minutes 30 minutes tops driving time between them?

Ted and I learned AGAIN today that looks can be deceiving.





Instead of picking something obviously requiring a ½ day journey, we picked a little town that after arriving there (30 minutes tops by our calculations using dead reckoning), would leave us plenty of time to take in the sights and to peruse the area for a good (cheap) restaurant for lunch. We could then pick another little dot a short distance away and do the same before dinner, returning back at a reasonable hour for the first time on this vacation.

Yah, sure ya betcha.







Our first error?


Leaving the road choice strictly up to Halette.

Again, this is really not a programming problem, but is a non-reality issue. Halette spits out her route using the information that she is given.
She doesn’t have to drive (she just sits there and laughs).

The roads (stretching the term a bit) she selected were the fast route (that is what we selected – fastest route).



She makes the assumption that a speed limit is an indicator of the ease of driving on a road.

All little roads in France have a speed limit of 90 k per hour.
One road looks the same as another to her from her perch.
With this information (or lack thereof) she selects the shortest distance as the crow flies.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
I’m actually surprised she doesn’t just have us go through farm fields or from driveway to driveway, you could really go “straight” using those “routes”.

Well, folks, the French may be crows.
They know those roads well and find a way to drive the speed limit.



Mostly they cheat.

As the roads are full of turns which would slow down those who think it prudent to stay in their own lanes, the French just go sailing down the center of the road, or cutting off the other side going around the corners.

How they get away with this without killing themselves and on coming traffic is beyond me.
Remember also that there are seldom any guard rails and NO shoulders, only a few provided for men to pee on.








Ted is a cautious driver.

He has become more like his mother in that respect as time has gone on.








I, on the other hand drive like a casse-cou, much like my mother Margaret did. (They didn’t have to say Punch it Margaret to my 85 year old mother- she took off like a bat out of hell.)



Ted is the one and only driver in all of France that either 1) obeyed the speed limit always
or 2) actually went under the speed limit.

I’m getting better, but I’ve had to hold my tongue to keep from saying, get a move on Marian (Ted’s mother).

But on this trip, I wasn’t about to second-guess his speed or his driving techniques. He was doing a very good job, and I wasn’t about to encourage any changes.Unfortunately, traveling at a reasonable speed and keeping in your own lane makes it impossible to go 90 kph.




In fact it was more like 34 k ph around most curves and 70 on the straightaways (which were few and far between). To make a long story short(er), what should have taken us 30 minutes, took us more than two hours.
We arrived at our 1st destination well after the sacred lunch period. No food for us, I surmised.






Wrong! Before we came to the Medieval portion of town, we came into a new industrialized area!
It had many car dealerships, large industry type buildings as well as a HyperMarche (supermarche like Casino).

These all looked like a mirage, completely out of place with the likes of the surrounding small town.

The Hypermarche had a cafeteria, in fact TWO cafeterias and a take out bakery/deli as well.

It’s like someone built it just for us out in the middle of nowhere. (DeM?)

We took advantage of the gift – ate and “took out”. Taking in our dessert while taking in the Roman ruins next to the new industrialized area.





We now had just enough time left to see the Medieval city of Vaison la Romaine before the sun set. It was to be our only destination for the day. It would take hours to get back to the dot called Jausiers only centimeters away on the map.





..............The City of Vaison la Romaine was a marvel !!!....................









But Ted took one look at the nearly vertical small streets and said he would sit and wait for me at the bottom.








I toured the city by myself.

The pictures don’t do it justice.




















Up at the very top was a chateau that beckoned me.

While the first streets were “en pente”, that path of stone up to the chateau was decidedly suicidal.

I huffed at a passing couple returning from the climb, “C’est loin.” I wheezed.
“ Oh pas loin maintenant.” They smiled.


They lied.






Like the dots separated by centimeters, this chateau was a lifetime away, that is if you are old and have a leg that has a large metal shaft. But I was bound and determined to take a picture over the wall that surrounded the ancient monument.

........................And I did it.


Unfortunately, it took some time.
But the views were worth all the work.














Unbelievably, the climb down was worse than the up.

















Going down the little streets to get back to Ted was a beeetch.















I guess I was gone for over an hour.

I returned to a Tedscicle.

He was frozen and unhappy. (He is sitting under that canopy at the bottom on the right, trying to keep warm.)

The sun was setting when we got back to the car and headed home.









I was smarter with Halette, or so I thought.
I now knew how to trick her by putting in interim deviations that forced her on to the red roads that would be easier to drive.

It worked… at first.

Then we got to a city that had a detour.
You couldn’t take the major road out of town.
Since I didn’t know where to go, we asked Halette to pick a route – OUT of TOWN not home. But she took it that we wanted this alternate road.

This alternate road sent us on a wild goose chase that pushed us on to smaller and smaller roads down a valley.







From there I asked for an address that was up on our chosen red road to get us back on track.


It was a 2 hour detour so it turns out.


There are still some bugs to be ironed out with Halette.

Two things are true, though, if you get off the major road by accident.
1) Try making “U”y instead of taking the alternate route.
2) If push comes to shove, give up and let her take the reins, because she WILL get you to your desired destination ---- eventually ---- even if it is not on the most desirable route.

One final note, if you have to, you might try going right through the barricade and disregard the detour signs. It is possible you will fall into a big hole, but if it’s a rental, then hey, you can get where you need to go with a little extra dust. If the “flics” stop you, speak English and smile stupidly. Americans have great training for this trick.

BTW, this is a learning process with this GPS. Today, I made a very importing tricking discovery. Perhaps this appears in the instruction manual that came with the Garmin Nuvi 270 and everyone knows about this but me. But here is the secret for all it’s worth.

To get the GPS to pick the route you want, Select Address. Name your destination (country) city, and then put in a 1 (one) for the street number. Next for the name of the street, put in the letter that goes with the route such as D if the route you want is D900. The GPS will list suggestions and the first ones will be the routes that start with a D that go through that town. This knowledge would have allowed us to avoid the disaster we had the 1st night on our way to Jausiers. That night, with the wrong gas and a car that barely worked we went 13 miles out of our way because I chose some random address in the city I wanted – Jausiers. Had I known this trick then, that night would still have been shitty. Just far less shitty than it was. Of course, it wouldn’t have been the adventure that stories are made from.





Tonight even with this new found knowledge, we still got in trouble because we missed a turn, ONE little turn and did not do a U-turn immediately. So Halette punished us (again) with still another hair raising, white knuckle route, in the dark, in the mountains. I swear from time to time I hear her softly giggling at our distress.



Despite all, Ted and I have decided that we could not travel without a GPS in the US or in any other country ever again.


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