We leave our main home exchange for our second home exchange.
A bit of explanation here - when we went back to New Hampshire for a family wedding - we said "oui" to an exchange request from Christine and Anne-Laure from St. Mandrier-sur-Mer on the Cote D'Azur and they stayed in our home and toured San Francisco during August 2010.
Now we will go and visit their home, but because they both work, they are "hosting" us for the weekend - fair exchange in our minds, as they will be there to suggest things to do and we hope to convince them to join us for excursions if they want.
So we hit the French motorways - wonderful highway system but very expensive in tolls. We made a huge mistake at one of our first toll booths. We entered a booth that only took pre-paid cards - no Euros....YIKES. We had to hit the intercom button and explain in our horrid French that we made a mistake and only had Euros to pay for our toll. You could hear the French "phewww" of irritatio over the speaker.
Just to add insult to injury, as we waited for the toll booth operator to dash through the other lanes to collect our Euros, emerging from the camper behind us a woman came up to the drivers window to yell at Ray...just as the operator arrived from in front of us to also yell at Ray...simultaneous French women yelling at him....all we could say is "We're sorry, we understand now wrong place, we're sorry" in 5th grade French. So humiliating.
We stopped off the Motorway to spend the night at the equivalent of a French Motel 6 - only with better food and good local wine. Tiny little room with twin beds and a black out curtain - we slept like logs,
Next day, we took a side trip to visit the Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct bridge, very impressive. Built so well that it withstood floods in 1990's when all around this area was wiped out.
After the bridge we head over to St. Mandrier-sur-Mer on the Coast aka Cote d'Azur.
