A quick walk down to Omaha Beach … seemingly, the British love RVs … what the landed gentry drive to the vacation house … “That engine sounds familiar,” I said …

So one morning, out on the Atlantic coast of France, I get up, and there’s Antoine, my host down in the kitchen. He’d been up for a while, reading the paper. He looked at me and asked, “Wanna go for a walk down the beach? There’s some interesting stuff down towards the touristy end.”

Sure, why not. I had never been down that way before, since the town was in the opposite direction.

It turns out that down that way, along the walking path, separated from the bike path, separated from the road, are a bunch of disused German gun emplacements from the Second World War. You come around this point of land, and suddenly the beach is broad and flat and deep. Anyone with any military sense could see that this was a place where you could land so many boats with so many men that you could easily swamp coastal defenses. No wonder the Nazis were nervous.

Perched above the beach, on the “high” ground was a series of 5 or so gun emplacements. They had maybe a 30 foot height advantage, but hey, you go with what you got.

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Race tracks should be this smooth … the Ford Fiesta in action … stay out of the left-hand lane, you moron! … “Sweet Jesus, was that a ’56?”

The bulk of the time I spent in France was out on the Atlantic Coast, in a little seaside fishing village/resort town. The next closest big town was named Royan, and seemed to be about the size of Portland Oregon.

To get there, we had to drive with our friends, Jeanne & Antoine, from Paris in a Rental car. Specifically, we were driving a Ford Fiesta. Don’t confuse this with the Fiesta of the late 70s early 80s, this is about the size and shape of Ford’s last version of the Escort here in the U.S..

We pick the thing up from Hertz in downtown Paris … the Hertz place is like rental places everywhere, fairly clean fairly efficient and fairly dehumanizing, like the DMV is it ran properly.

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What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Sept - Minivans of France

No, really, minivans … that size thing again … Don’t the French have large families? … sure seem cleaner than ours …

In many ways, minivans are the quintessential American vehicle, and, if you and I were being forthright and practical about our vehicle needs, we’d be driving minivans. Maximum space on the inside, minimum footprint on the outside, room for people, room for things, room for people and things, and reasonably efficient.

But, they lack any sort of fun in the driving department, so most car guys look at them as a necessary evil, like drip pans.

You’d be surprised to see a minivan outside of the US, and boy, I sure was when I saw my first minivan in Paris during this trip … then I saw another one, then another, and another … and then I realized that about one out of ten cars on the road in Paris and elsewhere was a minivan.

At first it was kind of disturbing, but then I realized that this is the same country that considers Jerry Lewis a comic genius and Mickey Rourke an underappreciated actor of lasting importance.

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What I Did On My Summer Vacation 2008 Part Six - The Smart Car In The Wild

The perfect car for the modern urban driving environment … that counts as the trunk, huh? … This still counts as a Mercedes? … Two Smarts in one space … any color you want, as long as it’s black … get a free car (some restrictions apply) …

As you would expect, Smart Cars are all over the place in France, mainly in cities. For the modern, urban driving environment, they’re just about perfect. They’re small, maneuverable, quick enough, and just big enough for 90% of the tasks that an individual driver has. Think of them as a four-wheeled motorcycle with a roof, rather than a small car, and you get a better idea of the mindset.

In a crowded, city driving environment, they’re the right tool for a lot of the jobs you face. Most of the time, cars are about personal mobility. Most of the time, it’s just you, driving in the car, going to your own personal destination. So for a lot of people, a lot of the time, you don’t need things like back seats, cavernous cargo areas and so on.

Being so small, you can maneuver in and out of traffic with ease in a Smart, you can park it in spots a lot of cars would even think of trying, and the MPG is bound to be quite high.

Until you actually see one of these things on the street, near other cars, you just don’t realize how small they are. I was able to do an informal measurement with one parked at the curb, and it seemed that with my right hand on the front bumper, the rear bumper was only 10 inches away from my left hand. I know they must be longer, but they seem to be about the size of a kitchen stove.

Of course, what comes in handy for things like zipping around double parked delivery trucks and tucking into bath mat sized parking spots doesn’t come in so handy when you need to move more than you, a friend and a couple of briefcases. I was checking a Smart out on the street, marveling at how they were able to squeeze all that stuff into the passenger compartment, when my wife remarked, “that counts as the trunk, huh?”

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Your Average French Car …. Comparing the size of your car to everyday objects … special editions – Picasso and xBox? … that design makes sense from the inside … half as thin as Mercedes sheet metal …

Your average French car is, as you would expect, small, weird, ostensibly underpowered, demonstrably over-designed , space efficient, even more fuel efficient, and work far, far better then your average American would think of at first glance.

The first thing I noticed was how much smaller cars were in France. A two door VW Golf was clearly a mid-sized car in comparison to what else was on the road. You saw a ton of two and four door hatchbacks on the road. As a matter of fact, of the privately owned cars on the street, I would say the biggest majority would be hatchbacks.

Most of them were VW Polos, Honda Fits, and seemingly countless Citroen, Peugeot and Renault city cars. There were so many French cars, that keeping the individual model names or designations straight in my head was next to impossible.

The hatchbacks were, essentially, the bottom end of the food chain, and this brings up the first really odd thing I noticed: There are no small sedans in France.

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Scooters In Paris … Vespas are a rare site … Maxis. high speed, high HP … that sounds like more than a 250cc … Apart from bad weather and the whole crush-space thing, they make a whole lot of sense …

As you would imagine, scooters are a widely used for of transportation in France. You see them in the countryside, and in small towns and around colleges, but where they are most plentiful is in larger, urban areas. As just a rough guess, I would say that about 10 to 15 percent of the vehicles on the roads of Paris are scooters of one sort or another.

Being small and maneuverable, they work well in the city’s heavy traffic and hard-to-find parking spots, and since gas is the equivalent of $9.80 a gallon, using something that gets 70 miles per gallon seems like a smart move.

The first thing that I noticed on the scooter front as the lack of Vespa. The brand that pretty much defined what a scooter was is noticeably absent from the streets of Paris. In the whole time I was there, I saw only two Vespas. One seemed to be new-ish and fairly well maintained, and the other looked to be from the 60s and about ready to burst into flames, just sitting silently at the curb.

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