Road Trip Day 1: Tours to Versailles to Rouen

In 2007, I had the privilege of travelling around France, Switzerland and Italy with three friends and I wrote all about it in this blog starting with the post post here (click)!  We ended the road trip that summer in Versailles and here are my thoughts and photos from that trip.  This time in France, my slightly different group of four started our 7-day tour of France and Spain in Versailles.  I rented a wonderful car from Europcar again, this time through the discounted website of Auto Europe (they served us well in 2007 and their prices are still the best)! Here are Mel and I posing beside our suave car.

It is an Opel Insignia--I finally got to drive a French car!  It was very nice.

So on Wednesday, I drove Jenelle and I to Versailles (from which she was continuing on to Paris) where I was meeting Judy, Alanna and Mel.  Jenelle and I were trying to avoid driving on any toll roads, but right outside of Tours, we came across a strange detour that instructed us to go back to Tours!  It seemed ridiculous and we weren't the only drivers who decided to ignore the signs and find their own way.  We were following this little red car and ended up at a farm!  The driver of the red car was asking the farmers where to go and we learned that we really did need to follow the detour signs!  I decided to just take the Autoroute with its tolls after all, at least for a bit until we could find another highway.

There's not much new to write about Versailles this time.  The leaves were changing colours and there were no flowers; they'd added a couple of ugly, modern sculptures.  And we were able to go inside this time.  Here's a statue of the the guy responsible for Versailles with a bird on his head!

That curved copper thing in the background is one of the new items

He liked his gold.

They changed the tree pruning since last time.

My camera battery died inside Versailles right around this photo...

We ended up leaving Versailles a little later than we planned and we still had a ways to drive to our planned destination of Rouen, the "historic capital of Normandy".

 We also couldn't get our GPS working right!  Mel had brought a Canadian GPS on which she had made sure to upload European maps, but it wasn't locating the satellites at all!  And we didn't have any maps so we had to do our best to figure out how to find the suburban hotel we had in mind.  We ended up missing it and ended up in downtown Rouen.  Fortunately we found a quad room available at the Hôtel Versan that was reasonably priced and right where we ended up!  It also seemed to be right near the main attraction of Rouen, the cathedral.  Or so we thought--that is the next day's story.  The only downside was the angle of incline on their underground parking--I went to bed feeling quite nervous about the forthcoming and inevitable ascent. 

But we arrived successfully, got settled in and set out to wander around and find somewhere to eat at 9:00!  Something that would fit everyone's craving for vegetables and salad (apparently the other three had been lacking in this department during their three previous days of travel and in Paris).  We asked some locals for their advice, but didn't end up taking it (they sent us to a place that served tapas, but no salad) and instead found the very nice Restaurant 16/9 who made some mean salads (huge!) and amazing cheese and spinach ravioli and served some nice wine!  All in all, a little crazy and stressful at times (particularly concerning the GPS) but all-around good first day!