Page 28 - Jan2023

Driving in France, continued from page 27

Luckily, there are no stop signs in France.
t
Seriously, I don? think there are actually any stop
signs anywhere, at least in this part of the country.
The road intersections were nearly all roundabouts,
with an attractive traffic island in the middle. No
stop and go, just go. I was beginning to love this
country already.

Unfortunately, by now my hands were getting
f
that tingly feeling of ?alling asleep? The steering
.
wheel was very small and very thick. There were
unusual bulges on the rim that required twisting
your hands to get your thumb around the rim.
Clutching the bulged area required extending your
arms all the way out, and then rolling your wrists so
Above: While stop signs may be in short supply in France,
that your fingers pointed in together. Kinda
there is lots of other signage to entertain and confuse
unsustainable.
tourists. Image by iStock Oliver de la Haye.
You could try to rest your hands at the bottom of
the wheel, but there was an extra spoke, and the
openings were too small for me to fit all of my either side of the highway, tall and uniform, with
fingers in there. Did the design engineer have really smooth pale bark, and branches arching to meet
tiny hands? Was the wheel intended for the use of over the center line of the road.
children? Perhaps it was for extra collision padding. Lush, immaculately tended fields stretched off
t
Maybe is was so that drivers couldn? hold the wheel to either side. Low mountains in the distance,
at the bottom? I dunno, I?ve driven hundreds of dotted with the ruins of small castles,
cars, but never encountered a wheel like this one surrounded the fertile valleys. Every few miles
before. By careful trial and error, however, I
there was an impossibly photogenic village, with
eventually found that bracing my left elbow on the
quaint stone houses, straight out of a fairy tale.
window sill made it possible for me to maintain a
Francais je ne pais!
steady grip on the wheel without inducing
involuntary muscle spasms.
Now I was now able to cruise comfortably.
Heading directly out of town away from the airport,
there were no suburbs, and it was immediately
rural. In France at last!
The Joys of t he Count ryside

It seemed very different. I took a few minutes to
consider the differences. Traffic was very light.
There was no trash. There were no signs, no
billboards. The road was straight, with pavement so
level and smooth it seemed like a fantasy.
Where was a single continuous mile of pavement
like this in the US ? Gorgeous plane trees lined

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