Forgot the headlights

We're off to our Gite in Brittany again for half term holiday.

All was a bit chaotic with packing the car and getting ready, made considerably harder because I have been away with work all week including today when I was in Winchester. Long drive back home to Bedfordshire, collect the family and then drive down to Dover - all in the rush hour traffic of course!

En-route to the port I remembered that we hadn't got anything to adapt the headlights from left to right hand drive for driving in France.

Oh well resigned myself to buying adaptors at no doubt an inflated price on the ferry.

Fortunately we got to Dover with half an hour to spare so were able to go and find some shops. Thanks to Asda we were able to buy a roll of thick black gaffer tape for £2 which did the job perfectly.

Happy days!

"Here's my alcootest", officer

It's been pretty well covered in the UK news, on TV, radio and the press (even my father phoned me up to warn me), but just in case, you may have missed that one of President Sarkozy's parting acts was introduction of a new breathalyser law that came into effect on Sunday last - 1st July 2012.

Craig over on This French Life has a link to the official French decree and warns of the incoming requirement, which is that by law you must carry an unused single use breathalyser in your car at all times and be able to produce it on demand.

Because the requirement is for the breathalyser to be unused, the general advice is that you should carry two breathalysers with you, in order to be sure that one hasn't been used.

You can of course pickup a breathalyser on the ferry on the way out to France (I think they were circa £6 each), or you could buy one on ebay UK (for about £4), or when I first looked they were on sale on ebay France for about £3 - but repeating the search today I couldn't find any at this price - just search for ethylotest or alcootest.

Alternatively you could wait until you get over to France and pick one up in a supermarket. You will probably pay around €1 to €1.50 each.

The French Police have advised that up to the 1st of November they will not be enforcing the new law and will just reminding motorists of the new obligation, but it does make sense to buy one (or two) soon to protect yourself from the Gendarmes.

Finally a reminder that this law and all other details of what you need to carry in your car whilst driving in France as well as helpful hints and tips for motoring in France is on the updated Driving in France page of our website.

Flash bang, oops

Following on from my last blog posting, travelled over to France via DFDS Dover/Dunkerque where I talked about the time and cost difference of taking the longer drive down from Northern France to Brittany.

In fact it didn't cost me anything in autoroute tolls as I took the N roads that run roughly parallel to the autoroute and were of course the original main roads before the autoroute's were built. There's two sections of tolls on the route we take from the Northern ports, one section from Boulogne to Abbeville, and the second from South of Rouen to Caen. The N roads took a little longer but it was a pleasant drive ... right up to the point when I went past a speed camera (Contrôle radar) at mumble mumble slightly too fast, and flash bang and I was caught on candid camera.

Well I don't know whether the camera had any film in it or whether the French highway authorities have arrangements with the UK to pass on details of speeding British cars or not, but it's been a few weeks now and so far I've received nothing in the post so fingers crossed. Having said that though I have nervously opened every letter I've had that has been obviously posted in France, so far two bank statements and a new cheque book which arrived by registered post - so I was doubly worried at the sight of it !

And just so you don't do like me, here's a useful link to locations and maps of speed cameras in France.

Driving in France - hints and tips

French Roadsign

One of the things that I managed to do whilst we were on holiday in August this year was to finish writing the new 'driving hints' page for our Gite website.

I remember when I first registered the www.giteinbrittany.com domain name and I'd placed a Gite advert in the village magazine before the website was finished. The race was on to get the website finished before the magazine was distributed around the village and so I spent night after night churning out the pages of the site.

Since then my output of writing new content has slowed down somewhat ... ok, it's slowed down and awful lot, and the time between writing new pages has stretched into months and months.

Looking back in the Blog archives I can see that I added a 'what is RSS' page in February 2007, the PictoBrowser-powered photo gallery in March 2007 and details of the nearby world heritage site of Mont St Michel in June 2008. So looks like I'm averaging about one page a year - so this could be the only new page I actually finish writing this year!

Anyhow, back to the plot (such that it is) ...

Although we've had a holiday travel options and routes page on the Gite website since launch which has some details about driving in France, it's mainly focussed on whereabouts in Brittany the Gite is, and how easy it is to get there whether you choose to go by plane or ferry, and from wherever you want to travel across the UK and Ireland.

I thought that I ought to supplement this with more specific details of what it's like to drive in France and what the key rules and regulations are for both you and your car. I spent quite a lot of time trawling through different sites on the internet to put this page together, including the AA and RAC motoring in Europe pages, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth 'advice for travellers' and various leaflets and brochures I'd picked up over the years.

There's details of French speed limits (which vary according to whether the road conditions are dry or wet), important things you need to know when driving such as 'Priorité àDroite', how and where to fill up with fuel (and what the different pumps contain) and the legal obligations for taking your car to France such as carrying a warning triangle, spare bulbs and a reflective jacket.

Finally I've included English/French translations for dozens of the most common road signs you could see on your holiday so you're not baffled by Toutes directions, Suivre Rennes or even Cédez le passage!

Hope you find useful the new Driving in France - Hints and Tips.

And as a bonus challenge, test your knowledge of driving in France with the roadsign above. Do you know what it means? On a holiday programme I saw last year they quizzed people on the cross-channel Ferry and hardly anyone knew what this sign meant - do you?

And if you don't know, suggest you surf over to our French motoring information page!!

New format french car number plate

Whilst we were on holiday over in France I spotted for the first time a 'new style' French car number plate.

Since April 2009 newly registered cars in France have been issued with a numberplate of the format XX NNN XX with the X's and N's being issued in strict chronological sequence nationally. The department code that represents where in France the car has come from now appears in a blue box on the right (so in this case, department 56 for Morbihan - South Brittany), and no longer forms part of the number plate.

This'll reduce the amount of paperwork that the old licence plate scheme caused with cars having to be issued with a new registration number if they were bought by someone in a different department, or if you moved home you'd also have to re-register your car. The new number plates are now issued for the life of the vehicle.

Also on the right of the plate is an optional regional name, Bretagne (i.e. Brittany), the regional flag, and to doubtless keep any Brittany separatists happy, the regional name for Brittany in the Breton language - Breizh.

I first wrote about France changing the car number plate scheme back in early 2008 and even since then new scheme's introduction ended up being delayed a further year.

UK Traffic Conditions now on Google Maps

Traffic details on Google Maps

I noticed the other day that Google Maps have now started showing traffic details for most of the UK motorway network - simply click on the "Traffic" button on the top right above the map and you're shown live traffic details with normal traffic flow showing up in Green then changing to Yellow, Red and finally Black as the conditions worsen.

But there's more !

Clicking on the 'change' link next to the traffic speed legend and you're able to see historic average journey speeds for any day of the week or time period. With this you can easily see when the car parking opens on the M25 or the M6 snarls up past Birmingham, and it seems to be fairly accurate, my daily commute to Stockley Park is shown as getting difficult from about 6:30am, and is stop-start all the way round from 7:15am. Yep, I've been there a few times!

So far almost all of the UK Motorway (and Motorway grade A roads) are included and long stretches of a number of main A roads are covered as well (e.g. A1, A421, A43, A14), but there are still a few inexplicable gaps (e.g. there is a 1 mile gap on the M25 next to Abbots Langley).

Whilst I'm on the subject of traffic news I should mention Keep Moving which (once you've enrolled for free) you can setup your regular journeys (home to work, work to home, home to in-laws, etc) and then at a glance see what the journey time is likely to be and if there are any holdups on your route. You can get free texts sent to your phone or daily summary reports sent by email - I receive a morning text at 7am before I get stuck on the M25 and an email at 5pm before I attempt the journey home.

Keep Moving has a number of other features but they're not all that well integrated together on the website. There's CCTV images from the Highways Agency so you can check for yourself where the holdups are, eye witness traffic reports from other motorists, cheap fuel locations along your route and cheap food (from supermarkets) instead of being ripped off at a service station.

Some of these features can be a bit frustrating to use as once you've looked at the doom and gloom of the traffic holdups on your journey home you then have to separately search by road name if you want to look at the live CCTV images - so much better if they were available on the same map, but the data seems to be good and hopefully these usability things will improve with time.

Final mention goes to Route Scanner which mashes up Google Maps with live traffic information from the BBC Travel and Highways Agency. The Route Scanner search engine seems to be quite temperamental, it took several attempts for me to get details for my typical commute; I only got through when I entered details of nearby large towns on my route - post-code entry and both my home village were not accepted.

Holiday Driving Hell - Monday 14th July, 8pm

A quick TV tip I spotted that looks to be worthwhile watching, on Monday next week on ITV1 there's a programme entitled "Holiday Driving Hell".

I caught the end of this weeks programme and from what I saw they were going to be talking about driving in France, and how British holiday-makers can inadvertently break the law, face on-the-spot fines or have their vehicles confiscated.

They were interviewing people on the ferry across to France to see whether they could recognise various French road signs (many couldn't) and talking to people who have managed to fall foul of the foreign driving laws.

On my long term "to-do" list for the website is to write more about the differences of driving to France. I have started the new website page but like many things, not quite finished it. I think I'll be putting the video on for some more inspiration ...

Prix des Carburants - easily find the cheapest fuel in France

Prix des Carburants

Whilst I was over in France earlier this month I noticed the significant price rise in unleaded petrol (sans plomb) and diesel (Gazole) since I was last over at Easter.

In just a couple of months I've been away Unleaded has risen from €1.30 to around €1.50 a litre, and diesel's now about €1.40. It wasn't that long ago I can remember petrol being around the €1 a litre mark - a 50% increase ! Combined with the poor UK/Euro exchange rate it means that unleaded petrol is roughly £1.19 a litre (i.e. about the same as the UK) and diesel £1.11 (i.e. still about 15% cheaper).

Every time we went over to France we've got into the habit of filling up our 20 litre petrol can at the last petrol station just before we get back on the boat, but this time it just didn't seem worth it for me to do this. With my wife (Liz's) car which is a diesel, rather than the unleaded mine takes, it'll probably still be worth it as the French government has historically charged a significantly lower tax rate on diesel so the price differential is still worthwhile.

Back in November 2006 I wrote about the MINEFI website that compared French fuel prices to the rest of the EU but looking back at the site this week I found that it hadn't been updated since then January 2007 when unleaded was €1.16 a litre.

As always there's easily a 10% price difference between fuel prices at the hyper-market and those paid on the autoroute so I thought I'd try to find an easier way of searching out cheap fuel than my usual approach of following the signs for centre commercial (commercial centre) which if you're at an unfamiliar town will usually lead you to where the hypermarkets and out-of-town retail parks are located.

After fruitlessly searching the MINEFI site and a couple of other French government websites for more up to date fuel pricing information I thought I'd give Google a turn and rapidly found the Prix des Carburants website which is a doddle to use (even if your French isn't perfect).

Firstly you can either search by department or commune (town) and you'll be presented with a list of all the fuel stations in that area, and their most recent prices for gazole (diesel), GPL (LPG) or SP95 (unleaded). You can sort the list alphabetically or by cheapest/most expensive, and produce a popup map of where to find the petrol station:

Far more powerful though is the route-finding feature on the right-hand side of the website home page.

On this you enter your starting address (either postcode, town or road within town), end address and what fuel your car uses, then on clicking 'Lancer la Recherche' (run search) you're presented with a route from your starting to end destination and a list of fuel stations along the way.

For each fuel station there's the name, what chain it's in, the distance along the route, and of course the most recent fuel price (and date the price was received).

What I noticed was really clever was that as well as showing all the petrol stations that are directly on your calculated route, which on the motorway would of course only show those at the fairly infrequent service stations, you're also presented with the petrol stations in the proximity of your route (Proximitéé du parcours), and against each the distance off your route that they lay so you can easily see whether it's worth a detour.

The map provides the usual scrolling and zoom options you'd expect, and for highlighted fuel stations you can click on the petrol pump symbol to show a popup address box and fuel prices.

I did encounter a few random screen-draw problems where the map sometimes got a bit corrupted. Not sure why, maybe they'd not tested it properly on Firefox (I didn't try with IE), but zooming out and then in again tended to fix the problem.

This example shows the E Leclerc hypermarket near Outreau which is just outside Boulogne on the route towards the autoroute. Needless to say I've been there more than once on my way to and from Brittany!

Finally for regular users you can create an account to bookmark your favourite petrol stations and frequent routes across France.

All in all, I thought that Prix des Carburants was an excellent website and a great example of what the Internet can do.

French numberplates to change in 2008

FrenchEntree reports that the system of French number plates is due to change this year from being allocated on a departmental basis to being allocated nationally, and being fixed for the life of the vehicle.

Current French vehicle number plates are of the pattern of NNNN AAA 99 with NNNN being up to four numbers, then two or three letters AAA, followed by a two digit department number 99. Our holiday Gite is on the border of department's 56 and 22 (Morbihan and Cotes d'Armor) so we see lots of cars with number plates ending 56 or 22. The advantage of this system is that you can see instantly where the car has come from but it causes a lot of administration as cars have to be re-registered in the right department if you move house or if you buy a car from a different region.

In 2008 the system is apparently going to change to AA NNN AA (up to two letters, two or three numbers followed by one or two letters at the end) so the first plate issued will be A 11 A and the last will be ZZ 999 ZZ. The licence plates will be issued chronologically in a nationwide sequence and so won't have any geographical code within the number plate.

If owners wish, they can have a white on blue geographical identification added to their plates which will appear on the far right hand side of the licence plate (opposite the EU logo). The regional code will be on top (e.g. IdF for Ile de France) and the department number will then appear below it (e.g. 92).

In a country that almost makes beauracracy a national pastime, it's interesting to hear that some of the reasons for introducing the change are to simplify the administration effort for drivers and to reduce the civil service workload!

It's going to make it harder to play the game of "spot the car number plates" we play with the children when we holiday in France. The aim is to try to see one car from each department in France (01 - Ain, 02 - Aisne, ... through to 94 - Val-de-Marne and 95 - Val-d'Oise, and of course 2A - South Corsica and 2B - North Corsica). It can get quite a challenge to see the final plates you've not 'ticked off' and gives something to distract the kids with!

New Google Maps feature - send destination details to my BMW

Over on Google's Official Blog they've announced new feature to integrate Google Maps to BMW Assist.

On YouTube they've put together a video that shows someone reading looking up an address on Google maps and then emailing that to their BMW and then BMW 'accepting' it as a destination in the car satellite navigation system. How cool is that?

Here's the links to the YouTube video showing this feature, and the German video as well.



Interesting to see how technologies are starting to converge and Google's extending its influence to other areas. Pity my Nissan satnav doesn't do this.

Finally fully back on the road again

Think I can finally draw to a close the long running saga of getting my car repaired after it was rear-ended in November 2006 and then declared unsafe to drive.

Since then Zurich Insurance (the third party's insurance company) have hired a Vauxhall Zafira from Enterprise rent-a-car but I had lots of problems trying to arrange to take the hire car to France and ended up with a Hertz hire car with cruise control which was great fun.

3 weeks ago I got my car back from the garage again but the repairs were pretty shoddy so after another week of messing around with my insurance company I finally managed to get the car back to the garage again for re-repair.

Last week the car returned back after the second set of repairs. They've done a much better job this time and I'm reasonably happy with the end result.

I've got my no claims bonus back and on Thursday I renewed the tax disc so I'm finally 100% street legal and in my own car at last. The hire car's gone back (after 3 months and 3,500 miles) and it feels really strange to be driving my Primera again after spending so long in the Zafira.

I'm still having physio for my back and according to the doctor I will need another 6 treatments, possibly taking up to 7 months to fully recover. There's a personal accident injury claim (on a no-win no-fee basis) rumbling on as well but I'm glad I'm able to finally draw a line under the car repairs.

Ongoing saga of the car - some good news for once!

My long-running saga with my trusty Nissan Primera continues after the car was smashed in the rear last November.

I got the car back from the repairers a couple of weeks ago but was not at all happy with the repairs. Outside everything looked perfect but inside the boot-well there was clear signs that it'd been involved in an accident. There were crease lines in the metal, lots of filler where bits of metal had been cut out and then welded back in and the spray painting was a different colour on the new metal than the old metal.

In short it was definitely going to reduce the car's eventual resale value. Given that the accident hadn't been my fault I wasn't going to accept it like this.

I phoned my insurance company up and told them the problems and they said they'd tell the garage to come and collect it, take some more photos, then their engineers would decide what to do.

A week later having heard nothing I phoned them up and they suggested that I take the photos for their engineers. Fortunately I had already taken some so I sent them off and waited.

Few days later they emailed me back to suggest that I take it up with the garage !!

Argh. Phoned them up and made it quite clear that as they'd arranged the work then it was up to them to sort out the problems with the garage.

Result! The garage phoned back the next day, said they understood I wasn't happy, and booked it in for re-repair.

Of course I had to wait yet another week and a half before they had a repair slot, and on Tuesday this week I took it in for repair (again).

And the good news out of all this ?

Today I received two cheques from my insurance company with repayment of the £300 excess that I'd had to pay and £242 for when I had to hire another car from Hertz to go to France. I wasn't expecting these cheques from my insurance company, thought I'd have to claim them directly off the 3rd party - so a small bit of good news.

My insurance company also said in the letter that they've closed the case as they've had full reimbursement from Zurich insurance so now I have to get my no claims bonus re-instated and then hopefully get my car back next week with all the repairs done properly ....

Out of control with cruise control

Got back on Tuesday evening after a quick weekend jaunt to Brittany to check up on things and to take over yet more furniture and kids toys.

As I wrote last week I ended up having to hire an estate car from Hertz to go to France as the loan car I had from Enterprise (whilst my car is being repaired) couldn't be insured for overseas use.

The hire car I ended up with was a Ford Mondeo Estate, and although I have to admit to not being a Ford fan, it did have a lot of room inside and went OK. The "killer gadget" that got my attention was cruise control, which is not something I've ever experienced before. The principle of cruise control is dead simple, you set the speed you want to drive at and can increase and decrease it via steering wheel buttons.

At first I found cruise control incredibly frightening as if you set it at (say 60mph), you'd soon find the car in front had slowed down slightly and I'd be inexorably accelerated towards a collision - requiring a rapid jump on the brakes to disengage the cruise control. After scaring myself silly a few times I started to get the hang of it and found that I actually did quite like the feature.

In France there's much less traffic around (and in my opinion much better lane discipline on the roads) so it was a doddle to sit cruising along for mile after mile along the autoroute from Boulogne to Brittany. Even in the UK I found it useful to ensure that I remained under the speed limit and I'm sure I annoyed one or two other motorists by sticking precisely to 50mph when they were tailgating me in the M25 roadworks !

So cruise control goes on the list of desired features when I replace my Nissan Primera.

As for my trip to Brittany I got quite a lot done, I think the tally sheet was:
   Gate - rebuilt, repainted and repaired
   Builder - doing well with the plastering and due to start on the new windows next
   New sockets and TV in the master bedroom - installed
   Garden - looking good, the gardener's making a difference and there are less weeds around
   New kids slide - built
   Latch on the other set of gates - repaired and screwed back on
   Saucepan lid - repaired
   Air vent over the velux window - repaired
   Shower control - temporarily repaired, will have to be replaced

As usual there was a mixture of doing things I had planned to do and having to repair minor breakages and damage around the house. Just one of the considerations of running a holiday home I guess

The car's been declared sick

Following on from the story a couple of weeks ago about being rear-end shunted in my car, the insurance claim is still trundling through. The garage came out and surveyed the damage; good news is it's repairable, bad news (for the other driver) is that it's likely to cost about £2700.

As my car is due it's MOT in a couple of weeks time I took it down to the garage to see what chance there was of getting it through and unsuprisingly they declared it unsafe to go on the road. The bumper's broken and the jagged edges will mean an automatic fail.

Got onto the other guys insurance company on Friday and they agreed to provide a courtesy car which I went to collect today. Originally suggested I have an Astra but in the end I got a Vauxhall Zafira which has 2 foldaway seats in the boot (which doubtless the kids will love). The car goes OK but it's a bit too plasticky for my liking inside but at least it keeps me mobile until mine's repaired which is now not going to happen until the new year :-(

My back's also been playing up again after the accident. I was very stiff this morning and could hardly get out of bed so went to the docs and have been given some anti-inflamatory's. Supposedly the pain and stiffness will all recover eventually but may take some time.

Bumps and property sales

I'm not having a good week this week as some kind person ran into the back of my car whilst I was going to work on Tuesday.

It was a typical UK commute run - raining, heavy traffic and roadworks so it was stop/start/move forward a bit/wait a bit longer/etc. Just the kind of reason why I don't like living in the UK. Anyway at one of these times when I was stopped I looked in the rear view mirror to see that the car behind had decided not to stop - crunch! My poor old car is now somewhat dinted and will need a new bumper, number plate, under-bumper panel, rear light and probably a boot lid as well. All in all it's going to be expensive but fortunately not for me or my insurance.

Of course I couldn't find the insurance policy details that evening as I'd forgotten that I'm with an internet based insurance company, Swiftcover who don't provide paper copies of the policy. I eventually found my login details, registered the claim, and yesterday arranged with the garage to get them to come and inspect the damage.

Swiftcover are not going to provide a hire car whilst it's being repaired (as I didn't select that option on the policy) but I spoke to the other guy's insurance company and they're happy to arrange one for me as it's going to end up being a fault claim against him. Insurance settlement times must have improved because Swiftcover said that they expect the claim to be settled against him in about 3 weeks. Many years ago when my father had a claim against another driver it took 3 years to settle.

The other problem I'm now having is that after the jolt my back is starting to play up again. I'm getting a lot of pain around the shoulders, the neck muscles are stiffening and I can hardly turn my head from side to side. Typing on the computer is not good either. I've had similar back problems before but after osteopath and physio who gave me accupuncture it's been OK for over a year. I'm thinking that if this doesn't settle on its own in a day or so I will have to go back for more treatment and make a claim against the other insurance for the cost - Swiftcover are again not helping me with that claim as I didn't select legal cover with my policy (bum).

On a more positive front we heard yesterday that our friends Angela and John who live near our Brittany Gite have sold one of their houses. I say one because they currently own 3 properties opposite each other in a small hamlet. They emigrated to France in 2004, bought a house which they had rennovated and settled down to enjoy their retirement. Last year they were lucky enough to buy two houses opposite them, one made of stone and one made of cob, and had the stone house rennovated by Bob the Builder (who's currently doing some building work for us).

Their plan is to sell the stone house and the house they're in now then rennovate and move into the cob house. The French property market seems to have slowed down this year as the agents report a reduction in the number of buyers both local and from the UK. John and Angela hadn't had any offers on either property until Monday when an English couple came round the stone house, loved it, and agreed a sale pretty much there and then. They've still got their original 3 Brittany bedroom house for sale so if you fancy a holiday home of your own in a lovely part of rural France, drop their agent a line (and I want a commission charge for the referral!)

French petrol prices

MINEFI Homepage

One of the nicer aspects of driving in France - apart from the generally straigher and emptier roads - is the difference in fuel prices. It always used to be the case that French diesel was cheaper than in the UK (Diesel is taxed much less in France), but unleaded was the other way round (i.e. France more expensive than the UK), and this in turn lead to a much higher adoption of diesel cars on the continent than in the UK.

Nowadays with increasing UK fuel taxes the situation has changed and all petrol prices are now cheaper on the continent than in the UK.

I've recently found a handy website from MINEFI (Ministère de l’Économie, des finances et de l’industrie) that lists current and historical French fuel prices and compares them to the rest of the EU:

• Current autoroute and non-autoroute French fuel prices for unleaded petrol
• Current French fuel prices for diesel
• Comparative €/litre prices for unleaded petrol across the EU
• Comparative prices for diesel across the EU

The headline you can take away from this is that French autoroute unleaded prices are similar to UK prices, but that it's about 10% cheaper to buy your fuel from a French supermarket than to buy it on the autoroute. Diesel prices are even cheaper in France, about 30% less than in the UK.

Personally we always try to go over to France with our fuel tank empty and fill up at the nearest supermarket, then refill the tank again just before we board the ferry.

To help our guests we've included in our holiday cottage travel directions instructions as to how to find the petrol stations that are nearest to the major ferry ports.

Spare a thought for the Dutch though, they come out as being even more expensive than the UK for unleaded fuel prices.

Update 7/7/08: The MINEFI website's not been updated since January 2007, see my more recent article on the Prix des Carburants site for current French fuel prices, route planning and more!

Rampaging french property prices near our Gite !

Rampaging Brittany Property Prices?

Part of the route when you're driving to our Brittany Holiday Gite takes you past a 'land for sale sign' in the nearby village.

I've always found the thought of building land for sale for €1 per square meter (60p or $1 or thereabouts) is quite amusing (compared to UK building land prices) so have included the sign in the driving directions.

Last time I was over in France though I noticed that the land has shot up in price to €6 per square meter this year.

Means I've had to spend several hours updating the travel directions with the new photo - several hours because we've got specific detailed directions from Calais, Boulogne, Dover, Rennes, St Malo, Lorient, etc - i.e. every single nearby French ferry-port and airport.

Last week I was cautioned by the Gendarmerie

Sorry for the delay in Blogging but I've just started on a new project at Shell (I'm a Managing Consultant for IBM's Global Business Services division) and as usual when starting a new project everything is very hectic.

Anyway, back to tales of our Brittany Holiday Home ...

As I blogged last week, the builder had started work on a new patio and driveway for our French Gite and we had guests arriving the following week so I was a bit nervous (to say the least) that everything would be finished and ready for their arrival.

I'd also managed to accumulate yet another car load of stuff to take to the Gite (just where does it all come from???) and a couple of open ticket's that I'd bought on speedferries that were due to expire soon so I decided to pop over for the weekend, take all the stuff and make sure everything was OK.

Leaving work early and driving down to Dover I failed to plan ahead properly for the roadwork's and general Friday evening traffic so I found myself with very little time and lots of miles to go. I won't actually say how fast I was driving (in case anyone official's reading), but suffice to say the I was going (very) quickly and I made it to the port with only 20 minutes to spare before the boat sailed.

I quite like Speedferries as their high speed catamaran is simple and not over full with shops and expensive food (in fact the snack bar is very reasonably priced), and best of all the crossing only takes about just under an hour to Boulogne so it's a chance to catch breath before the drive down to Brittany. The drive down is motorway for all bar the last 30 miles and takes about 6 hours (plus stops). Although this sounds like quite a long journey, for us it's actually about an hour door to door quicker than going via any of the other routes.

So as I'd caught the 17:40 sailing (UK time) and arrived in at 19:30 (French time) this meant I expected to arrive at the Gite sometime after 1am in the morning. By the time I'd filled the car up and driven through Pas de Calais, Normandy and Brittany and had a couple of breaks it meant it was about 2am when I turned off the autoroute for the last 30 or so miles. I've done the route enough times now to know exactly where I'm going and was pretty much driving on autopilot. About 15 miles away from the Gite you have to turn left at a roundabout on the outskirts of a small town. The roundabout is much larger than it really needs to be and as it was past 2am and the roads completely deserted I decided to take the short-cut and drive the English way round the roundabout - i.e. to the left rather than to the right. Nipped round to the left and carried on into the town.

A couple of minutes later whilst driving through the town, saw a blue flashing light behind me. Pulled in and a Gendarmerie car pulled in behind me.

French Gendarmerie

The two of them got out of their car so I thought I'd better get out to see what the problem was. The first one said something to me in French that I didn't fully understand so I decided to try the confused Englishman - Pardonez moi, je ne comprennent pas beaucoup le français.

"You drove the wrong way round the roundabout" he said in pretty good English (oh dear, not going to get away with not being able to communicate)

"Il est tard, je suis très fatigué" (it's late, I'm very tired) I replied, Je suis désolé (I'm sorry)

He then asked for my driving licence and I explained (in French) that "I didn't have it, it was in England, but I did have my passport". I don't think he was sure what to do about that as presumably carrying your driving licence is obligatory if you're French.

He asked me where I was going so I told him I had a house nearby and the name of the nearest village to it - but he didn't know where it was (despite it being about 15 miles away). I tried to explain how to get to it from where we were, but kept on getting the names of all the villages wrong so probably confused him even more. Then when I said that it was near to La Cheze his colleague (which up to now had remained silent) said that he knew where La Cheze was which seemed to reassure the first one that I wasn't just completely making my story up!

I was then asked for my driving licence again ... I knew he didn't believe me the first time. I explained (again) that it was at home in England.

He then asked for my passport and studied it carefully before telling me to be more careful next time and that I could go.

Phew!

Drove the rest of the way to the Gite without exceeding any speed limits or causing any more driving offences.

So when in France, just be careful of the Gendarmerie - even at 2am in the morning they're still out there!

Google maps come to France (and Germany, Italy and Spain)

As announced on Google's official Blog yesterday, country maps for France, Germany, Italy and Spain have now been launched in Beta by Google.

To be honest this has been long overdue as up until now Google's only had maps of the US, UK and Japan (clearly shows the global 'pecking order' as far as Google's concerned). Although officially there's only maps been launched for France, Germany, Italy and Spain, I noticed by scrolling round the map that maps for most of the rest of Europe have been loaded (to various levels of detail) including Portugal, Greece and Poland. Unfortunately Jersey and the rest of the Channel Islands don't get a look-in yet.

The level of detail (and hence I guess the source data) on all the main internet maps appears to be the same if you look at the village of La Cheze which is about 2 miles away from our Brittany Holiday Gite:

• Google's map is the largest and I think the clearest to navigate and scroll around
• ViaMichelin's map service has up until now been my personal preference for getting route directions
• Mapquest's map is as actually slightly bigger than Google's but I think looks a little dated and doesn't for instance show the river and Lake
• Multimap's map is nice and clear but the map size displayed is comparatively small
• Mappy's map is nice and easy to read and like Google's you can just drag your 'window' left and right to scroll the map. It also has a zoom in/out mode so that one click zooms the map (unlike Google where you can only use the scroll widget). The map size is however smaller.

Mappy and ViaMichelin loose marks in my view though for not having any obvious way to copy the URL or bookmark a map page. The only way I could find to do it was to use the 'email this map' to me option on the sites.

All the maps (apart from Google) have various 'click to show nearby hotels or cash machine' buttons. Google's instead you have to type in what Entreprise (company type) you are looking for - it's more exhaustive (here for instance is a map of plumbers near to La Cheze), but as you have to type your request in French it's not all that much use of you're a tourist.

Searching for Cash Dispensers near La Cheze correctly showed the location of one in the town centre on mappy (unfortunately though it only showed one of the two that are in the town), but it was much better than Google that suggested that the nearest distributeur de billets was some 35 miles away in St Brieuc or Rennes (and there was only 28 in the whole of Brittany ...). Strangely Google declared that there were 4 cash dispenser's in Brittany (i.e. the English spelling), the nearest one being in Lorient!

I think it just goes to show that although the map data is the same, the usability and the local search features vary greatly and are still far from perfect. Google's is however a strong contender.