Day 6 Thursday 6 April 2017

Checked out of the Hotel de Seine this morning after another pleasant and comfortable stay.  A quick cab ride saw me arriving at the Hertz depot at Gare de Lyon and collecting my little black Peugot 308.

The Peugot has a built in GPS but of course the instructions to program it are in French so I was unable to put my destination address details into it and the directions would have been in French as well (I will investigate this further as I am certain that I can change all that to English, I just have to find how).  Anyway I have my own GPS machine so I set that up and drove confidently (not) up 4 flights of car park ramps to street level.  When I drove out into the light of day of course it took some time for my GPS to acquire satelites and start telling me where to go.  So here am I in frantic Parisian traffic with not much idea where to go, luckily I spotted a sign that directed me towards Metz & Nancy.  Applying my TGW (The Great War) geographical knowledge I knew that Metz & Nancy were both on the Western front, so if I went in that direction I would be OK.  Eventually the GPS kicked in and everything was right and I was travelling in the right direction.

(A little known fact about the city of Nancy, Rennee and his brother in the TV show Hello Hello were born in Nancy, and he always said that they were a couple of Nancy boys.  It was funny at the time.)

After a couple of hours of driving, getting used to the car and driving on the right side of the road I arrived safely in Amiens.  As I am reasonably familiar with Amiens finding the hotel and car park was  done quickly and uneventually.

Amiens Cathedral

Mecure Hotel from the steps of the cathedral

I am staying at the Mecure in Amiens and although it is a largeish souless chain hotel, the rooms are large (compared to Paris) and clean and the hotel is well located.

Tomorrow will be my first day out in the TGW battlefields.  I bet you all can't wait to hear all about that.