If you rent a car to explore France, like we did, you\u2019ll need to get up close and personal with roundabouts. The French, and I suspect a lot of other Europeans, love these quintessential urban infrastructure anachronisms. On the one hand, they are highly efficient traffic cops, shepherding cars to their next exit without delay. On the other hand, they are technology-free, minimalist designs that could easily have existing hundred of years ago, and in fact they did, making your driving experience a true journey back through the centuries.<\/p>\n
After loosening your neck muscles to constantly be looking right, and learning to live without the clear confidence of a green light, you\u2019ll be ready to peel back the history of the French countryside.<\/p>\n
Karen and I mapped out a clockwise lasso of sorts around the country, trying not to get sucked back into the ever-present epicenter that is Paris. We catapulted ourselves out of The City of Lights by way of a 9 hour drive directly south to the Languedoc-Roussillon region, butting up against the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. In the sleepy beach resort town of Canet-en-Roussillon was a brand-spanking new Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 440 with our name on the invoice. It was high time that we see this new lady of the sea, and make sure work was progressing on her commissioning. Buying a new boat is different than a new car; you don\u2019t just show up at the dealer, negotiate your price, and drive home with your new wheels that day. Instead, a new boat is shipped partly disassembled from the factory – in our case from Les Herbiers, in the countryside west of Paris. A boatyard is selected to receive the new boat and to put all of its bits and pieces together – the \u2018commissioning\u2019 – and make sure everything works as intended. We bought our boat through a broker\/friend in upstate New York, Steve McPherson, from Navy Point Yacht Sales<\/a>. Steve is a Jeanneau dealer and sells a lot of them to hearty sailors on Lake Ontario. We were a bit of an exception for him by taking delivery in France, although one other customer of his recently did the exact same thing. He selected the boatyard in Canet-en-Roussillon named Sailing Atlantic Services, a company that does lots of Jeanneau commissioning for boats destined for the Med. And we paid a visit to SAS to make sure everything was moving along on schedule. In addition to the regular commission work of the boat, we had hired SAS to do several other projects to fit the boat out the way we wanted for long-term cruising. To our delight, we got to view the boat in the water, and the good folks at SAS were moving along well on the punch list of items. Some of the bigger projects – mounting the bimini and the solar panels, mounting the dinghy davits, and installing extra electronics – were nearly complete. With confidence in hand, it was time to hit the road for two weeks and figure out what else the French can do besides build fine sailing machines.<\/p>\n