My First Trip, Part One - Blog 3

Due to some technical difficulties, I need to skip over my first few days in France. I'll blog about them later once I figure out how to get the pictures transferred from the smaller camera Michelle lent me. So, fast-forward to my first weekend.

As many of you know, making friends quickly and easily has been a life-long challenge for me. Given my natural introverted tendencies, habit of deep, public introspection and disinclination for either being the center of attention or making a spectacle of myself, I've experienced serious loneliness and solitude. No, wait. Never mind. Nothing in this entire paragraph is true in the slightest.

Anyway, I seemed to fall in most easily with the handful of students who enrolled in Drake University's France program but weren't Drake students. We really wanted to go to the northern coast of France. We rented a car, paid extra for GPS and made hotel reservations.

Unfortunately, we didn't start this process until Thursday afternoon; finding hotel accommodations so late became a bit troublesome. Additionally, our collective lack of linguistic ability threw a few more onions into the ointment (and, if you recall from my previous post, there are already WAY too many "onions" up in here). After much tribulation (and more than a few lengthy conversations in what can only be called "Frenglish") we had it all set.

When Grady and I went to pick up the rental car Saturday morning we were fairly confident that we could walk from our hotel, find the rental place and be back to pick up the others within an hour. But we kind of got lost. A lot. For like two hours. We finally broke down and started asking random people on the street for directions. Let's just say that was "less than effective." Mercifully, we finally found the place, got the car and set out for the open road.

To be continued...