Day 1: Paris to Chartres

We start off with what ends up being a far longer day than anyone should endure, thanks to Air Canada’s personal-screen-we-dare-you-to-not-watch-3-movies-on-a-trans-atlantic-flight subterfuge.

Planes are a natural sedative for Winney

I’m not all that good at long flights, while Winney, of course was fast asleep before takeoff from Vancouver. The kids, once you put those LCD panels in front of them, can’t possibly close their eyes. By the time we land in Paris around the same local time as when we left Vancouver (but a day later) – total time of about 16 hours – we’re all getting little tired and cranky.

Renault came by to pick us up and deliver us to our France-mobile, a new Kangoo. We need every inch of storage space in the thing, making us realize there is no way we would ever be able to do this as a backpacking vacation.

Doris, our trusty GPS, quickly proves to be a lifesaver, and the maps of France that we bought beforehand have already paid for themselves. We set a waypoint at the Renault lot (so we can find it when we return the car), and have already punched in the address for our first hotel, so we can focus on looking around to aquaint ourselves with France (and the kids can focus on the insides of their eyelids for a while. We get a little stop-and-go traffic through the North of Paris (where we catch our first glimpse of the Tour d’Eiffel in the distance, then things open up on the way to Chartres.

We have named our car Bob

There are a couple of things we notice almost immediately as we are driving through Paris. The first is that you need to spend almost as much time watching your rear view mirrors as you do looking forward. Scooters and motorcycles squeeze their way through any opening, which can be particularly unnerving if you want to switch lanes in slow-moving traffic. Apparently this is completely legal here (or at least it is a law that is completely ignored by motorcycle police as well).

The other thing is the roundabouts: they are everywhere. Get ramped up to 120 or so on the highway, and you have to slow down to enter and exit a roundabout. Get ready to do it all again in 7 km or so. I hope the whole country’s not built like that!

One of the many small spots in Chartres - this one is from 1664!

We settled in to our first stop, a small hotel on the outskirts of Chartres, the Hôtel Marmotte. Just off the highway and near a bit of an industrial park, Winney is already starting to reconsider our strategy of booking all these spots online. It turns out to be squeaky clean, nice and quiet at night, actually not a bad little spot to grab some shuteye. We dump our stuff, freshen up a bit, and head into town.

Chartres is a small little town known for its cathedral (more on that in the next installment), and the area around downtown, close to this cathedral, has a lot of small shoppes and restaurants to wander by. Certainly a bunch of your run-of-the-mill things you can find back home (wherever ‘back home’ for you might be on this planet), but also a few spots that are definitely local, such as Le Rustic. We wander around for a while, grab a pastry and frolic in large plaza with the giant rabbits (check out the first installment of ‘Where’s Owie’), then find an open-air restaurant for dinner.

The first of many I expect to see...

We close out the night with a little more wandering, where we encounter a relatively small church (Eglise Saint Aignan), and our first flying buttress. While this was impressive (how many of these are there around Vancouver?), we had no idea that this would pale in comparison to what we would see tomorrow.