On the Road to Brittany

The car rental turned out to be a bit of an adventure and almost a catastrophe.  Both the pickup and return were slightly stressful events.

We had a car reservation for 10am at a Hertz inside Paris.  When we got their at 9:45am the door was locked and lookin through the window of this little store front was just a desk and a chair with no one inside. Around 10:15, after a couple more knocks and still no found through the window, unless they were hiding from us!  We reached someone on a Hertz 800 number and they said they didn’t know why...possibly with a shrug?  The Hertz guy then said he couldn’t make outgoing calls to try them either. What!  Come on! Unbelievable.  So we sat outside at a little restaurant next door and had coffee.  We had a lot of driving planned for this day.   Finally around 10:40am the guy showed up to say ...“you have an 11am reservation, no”.  No!

To get our Citroen C4 Cactus we had to walk a couple blocks away and go like 5 stories down into a parking garage to find the guy who handles Hertz cars.  We went over the car quickly with him. He gave us the paperwork, but apparently it turns out he did this without signing off on whether it had any dents or not.  This would turn out to be helpful when we returned it a week later in Toulouse :)

Driving out of Paris was a bit nerve racking. We couldn’t easily figure out the built-in GPS...this wasn't gone over with us much by Hertz.  We couldn't get it to speak Anglais.  While playing with this we went through a tunnel and I couldn't find the lights.  Didn't need em before the tunnel!  We couldn’t see a thing for like 5 seconds, maybe longer! ...then I found the headlights. Everything's fine.

With our late start we decided to not to stop in LeMans or detour to Fougeres (pronounced Fockgers) or stop in Rennes. We mad a lot of miles to do that first day.  We wanted to get to our ocean side hotel sooner than later.  We did roughly a 6 hour ride directly to the Le Plancton in Carnac, just outside Quiberon. Checked in and then quickly went to have a drink at a beach bar across the street.  After that we walked barefoot on the grand la plage! Felt terrific!  For dinner that night we went to a Restaurant Le Cavok in the heart of Carnac Plage.