Driving Miss Crazy: French Edition

Men and women are not meant to drive together. I don’t care how full your marriage is with rainbow cuddles and slobbery smooches. It’s a universal truth that cannot be altered. My husband would argue that I shouldn’t be allowed to ride passenger in any person’s car, regardless of gender. I dare say that 85% of our marital road bumps have come because of disputes over driving skills or the lack thereof. I fully acknowledge that I’m a chronically nervous passenger. I hear my mother’s voice reverberating through my own wind pipes as I yelp at Blair that he’s driving too close! I give him the lecture verbatim that my mother gave me as a sixteen-year-old about pressing the brakes as soon as you see any inkling of red brake lights in front of you. I can’t help myself. I blame my mother.

With our vehicle disputes in mind, I decided to try to tone down the “mother of a teenager in driver’s ed” bit during our drive through France. We enjoyed the serene views of deep green fields and picturesque chateaus for the first few hours from Beauvais to Normandy. Our GPS highlighted the way and kindly directed us to all the necessary turns. But despite the new scenery, I eventually dozed off to sleep with the chocolate éclair smudges still on my fingers. I’m sure my slumber was a welcome gift for Blair. He could drive in peace without his wife spastically slamming her foot on her imaginary passenger break every twenty minutes.

I must’ve been asleep for an hour or so when I recognized that the car was stopped and the sound of someone frantically trying to speak French slid down my eardrums. Blair was stopped at a huge toll road with about fifteen different booths full of drivers flashing either prepaid toll road cards or tossing change in the machines. Traffic was congested and people were in a hurry to get through the toll lines. The problem was that my husband had neither a prepaid card nor a lick of change to drop in the machine and from what he could gather, they didn’t accept credit cards.

Blair is usually pretty cool-headed, but I looked over at him and saw beads of sweat on the face of sheer panic. He was recklessly blurting out sentences composed of French, English, and Portuguese as he tried to explain his predicament to the lady in the booth five rows down. He may as well have been singing Happy Birthday in Japanese because she had absolutely no idea what Blair was saying. She shouted something at him that neither of us understood. He pushed the button again and she answered yelling the same thing. This went on for about ten minutes, while Frenchmen behind us honked and yelled. Meanwhile I was doubled over in the passenger seat laughing hysterically. Finally the lady lifted up the gate and we sped down the road in the getaway rental. We couldn’t stop laughing for hours.

Until we almost drove off a cliff to our deaths that is. You see, as we made our way to Normandy our trusty GPS told us to enter a roundabout and take our third exit to the right. When we looked at the third exit, however, it was an unpaved road spiraling up to a ramp that led to heaven knows where. I protested that there must’ve been a mistake – that road certainly wasn’t the right one. But Blair rolled his eyes and headed down the bobbling road anyway. I panicked and started screaming that we were driving onto an off ramp! Turn around! Turn around! I yelled. Right as we were rounding a bend, we saw a huge construction truck barreling toward us. I screamed and screamed as Blair swerved to the side and continued driving up the ramp. When we got to the top, what did we behold? An UNFINISHED freaking freeway. Nice, Mr. Willis. Nice…

You’ve officially failed driver’s ed.