In Which Our "Hero" Has a Bit of a Meltdown

Okay, so yesterday was NOT my finest hour.  It started out fine, but then I lost my temper in a big way.  We went to Charles de Gaulle airport to get the car, and our travel agent had sent us to the wrong terminal.  So we didn't get the right sized car -- it will be tight traveling once we pick Julia up.

That wasn't the problem.  And, the problem isn't that the French are stupid, although that doesn't help.  It rained hard all night long (and was still raining when we took the car from the airport), and that caused flooding at low levels on the major highways.  That caused a five mile, 45 minute back-up.  That's not what made me angry.  When I say the French are stupid, it's because this can't be the first time in recent history that it has rained hard, so why aren't there road drains in the areas where there is flooding?  Heck, all they have to do is drill a few holes in the concrete barriers and there would not be the flooding.  And when I say flooding, I mean I had to move over two lanes to keep from going through water so deep the car would have been endangered.

No, I lost my temper because when we were trying to get to the A-14 to Normandy, the tunnel was closed and there were no signs directing another route.  So, we had to take the southbound tunnel, which was closed to, so the back-up to an exit most of the way through the tunnel took forever to reach.  That's when I had my meltdown, because with technology, we were dependent on the GPS (actually the iPad map because the Garmin GPS is worthless in France!).  And, of course, the GPS and the iPad maps kept telling us to go through the closed tunnel.  It wouldn't reroute us. 

I cursed a blue streak -- stuck in a tunnel going the wrong way, with no way out.  Finally, we got out of the tunnel and hit on the idea of heading toward Chartres (wrong direction, but anything to get us out of Paris) to get heading out of the city.  Of course, if we had done what I wanted -- take the train to Caen from Paris and pick up the car there, it would have not required back-tracking through the hell that is Paris traffic in the rain, flooding and construction, but our travel agent couldn't make that work.

We weren't done yet -- we ended up taking a crazy route through Paris.  We could see the Eiffel Tower (definitely not what I wanted to see), and I made a bitter joke about being Clark Griswold driving endlessly around the Arc d'Triomphe.  A little later on, we were headed straight to the Arc d'Triomphe!  Seriously -- there it was in the distance (not far, but not close), and we were headed right to it.  Finally, we were directed by the iPad onto the Periphery Road (a sort of Beltway) and eventually made our way out of Paris, but not before seeing some of the neighborhoods (or arrondissements) that we hadn't seen -- or wanted to see!

We finally made it to the A13 after about 2.5 hours of stress and wasted time.  I did not handle myself well.