The bottom line after our first full two days in the new apartment in La Rochelle: Jetlag Triumphs! Especially when the two days haven’t been restful.
Day 1 was dedicated to returning one rental car and getting another one. The big Peugeot 5008 that we’d gotten at the airport in Paris and driven to La Rochelle had to be returned by 11:30, and our new rental had to be picked up by noon. We ended up reversing that, picking up the new one before taking back the old. Neither transaction was entirely smooth.
At E.Leclerc, the staff was flummoxed by the fact that our drivers’ licenses did not show the very first time we were licensed to drive (as the French drivers’ permits do). They require a driver to have been a licensed driver for a specified period (4 years I think), but the California license only references the date of issuance of the last renewal. Thus it looked to them like Suzie had only been driving since 2022, and that I’d only been driving since 2019. For a time it looked as if that might put the kibosh on our rental (which is a great deal, available only if you actually live in France: 217 euros per month plus 0.17 cents per km for a nice (if smallish) Renault Megane). But our innate honest personalities and the fact that we were both in our 60s convinced the agreeable young clerk that we had, in fact, been driving for 40+ years, and the rental went through.
The return of the Peugeot to Enterprise was difficult because there’s no lot at the office, which is located in a moderately congested area. You have to find a place to park, then walk to the office, or do what I did in the absence of any parking spots: park illegally and hope it didn’t get towed until the staff and I returned to the car. The car didn’t get towed, but the car was subject to a return inspection unlike any I’d been a part of – 20 minutes of going around and around the car and looking at everything in minute detail. They eventually found a small mark on one of the outside mirrors that cost me an extra 30 euros, which proves the old maxim, ‘Seek and You Shall Find.’
After that, Suzie had dispatched me to go to the office of the “Syndic” that manages our apartment’s homeowners association to get a key for a locked box, the opening of which was necessary to install internet service in our place. I walked five minutes to the Syndic office and explained what I needed. The helpful young woman had the same system for the homeowners association’s keys as I do for mine: a bunch of keys tagged and randomly thrown into a metal box. She pulled the keys out one at a time, looking at the tags, but never found the right key. She then left and came back with a large trousseau of keys, containing every single key that the Syndic had been given by the HOA. ‘You’ll just have to try until you find the right one,’ she said, which was OK by me. She handed me the keys and asked me to print and sign my name to a key-checkout form. She never asked who I was, or if I had any ID, which, once again, I ascribe to my truthy face and honest bearing.
The Google lady said the walk back to our apartment was 12 minutes, and I was sure that I could find the way on my own. Wrong. At least three wrong turns resulted in a 12 minute walk turning into 25 minutes. My feet and left leg were hurting, and I was very happy to get back to our place.
Add to this the stress of driving in La Rochelle (the streets are narrow and most are one-way only, plus the central area streets are closed to non-permitted vehicles) and the jet-lag, and I was extremely tired.
As concerns jet-lag, I discovered on this trip that it affects dogs as well as humans. Our first night here, Sparky, usually a right-to-sleep-when-the-people-do kind of dog, spent the first half of the night (10 – 2) in an agitated state, walking around and around on the hardwood floors, his toenails clack-clack-clacking through the night. The next morning, of course, he fell asleep and remained sacked out for most of the day.
Speaking of Sparky, he’s become a problem for us, because he’s taken to barking loudly everytime we leave the apartment without him. Apparently this is not unusual for dogs taken to a new place to live, but given that we are in an apartment with neighbors all around, we can’t just let him bark it out of his system. Fortunately, Sparky is happy as can be in the car, whether we’re there or not, so we’ve taken to putting him there when we leave, which will work fine until the weather gets warmer. We’re researching ways to address this “separation anxiety,” which may include (according to various websites) giving him little doggie antianxiety drugs. Thank god prescriptions are cheaper here.
Speaking of Sparky and cheaper things, he has an appointment on Monday with a very nice vet just down the street to get a molar removed (it’s become infected, and we would have done it in California but ran out of time). Yesterday we took him in for his pre-op checkup, and discovered that an operation we were expecting to pay a lot of money for in Berkeley will cost us $1,000 less here. No, that’s not a typo. $1,000 less. Remarkable.
The day ended with a wonderful evening of hors d’ouerves and drinks at the home of our friends Alain and Isabelle, with Sparky sleeping peacefully in the car.
Today was frustrating, as we didn’t get as much done as we wanted. In the morning a “fuite d’eau” expert hired by the Syndic to address water intrusion in one of our bedrooms came and spent 3.5 hours diagnosing the cause. Then the SFR internet guy arrived, and installed super-fast, fiber optic cable (our one success). We were waiting all afternoon for our new couch to be delivered, but when it arrived the delivery guys couldn’t get it up the stairs to our apartment (though Suzie thinks they didn’t try hard enough, a possibility since by this time it was 4 pm and they were do doubt tired). So that was a disappointment; we still don’t have any proper place to sit.
We tried again to leave Sparky in the apartment. Again he barked, and again we left him in the car.
We treated ourselves to a dinner out (salads for the both of us, believe it or not). It’s now 8:30 pm and we are looking forward to watching a movie on our computers.
I’m hoping the jet-lag goes away soon and Sparky starts accepting the new place as his home (he never barks when we leave our Kensington place). Both will happen eventually but the sooner the better.
Categories: France