Travels with a Mercedes*

This year, we hired a car. It was something of an experience, being, of course, left hand drive, and a diesel. I volunteered to drive it from the airport. There was a great deal of cursing and swearing and gnashing of teeth as I tried to find the gears.

It was fine on the motorways, but driving round some of the towns was a bit of a challenge, particularly as we seemed to go round Aix at least 3 times trying to find the hotel. After that, J drove, and got used to it, and quite enjoyed it, so I became the navigator, with my ‘super map’. This was also a challenge at times, as the French tend to be a bit sparing with their signage, and you have to work out where a road might be signed to, which probably isn’t the place you’re trying to get to. Again, towns were a bit of a problem.

Then of course, we had to work out how to put fuel in. We could find the fuel cap, that was obvious. But how did we open it? It didn’t help that all the instructions were in French.

‘What’s French for petrol, or petrol tank?’
‘Not sure’
‘There’s usually a little lever somewhere inside the car’
‘The one in my car has a little drawing of a petrol pump on it’

We looked at all the buttons and switches. There was a distinct lack of anything with a pump on it, though there was lots of other buttons.

After a few days, we’d got down to a quarter of a tank of fuel, so we really needed to work this out. Back to the instruction books. Finally, in the back, I found a picture of the fuel cap.

‘Right, where does it say the button is?’
‘It doesn’t, look’ (There was nothing on the diagram to indicate how you open it)

Once again, we searched the car looking for the elusive button. Suddenly, I had a brainwave.

‘Maybe it isn’t locked, and I should just try it’

I pushed at the fuel cap. It swung open so that you could get to the screw cap for the tank.

‘Oh!’

*this did say 'BMW', until it was pointed out that I was wrong!

**The picture is the Rest Stop which we found when we were looking for petrol near the airport. It seems not all French Rest Stops have petrol, some of them have Roman Theatres instead.