2nd Day in Amiens (Friday)May 21, 2010
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| Today is the day that we rent a car for several days! Oh, that was an experience! We need to get a taxi for the ride to Europcar since it is about five miles from our hotel. All the taxi’s in Amiens are BMW’s, Audi's, etc., pretty fancy taxi’s. Ours was a Perourt and it was very nice inside. He drove us straight to the rental car facility. Two of the girls there could speak more English than we could French, so that was good. After looking up our reservation, one of the girls looks out the window, says something in French and then two of the girls and a guy run out of the building. I guess they lost our car, but finally found it and took it in to have it vacuumed and washed! About an hour later we are driving away in our Renault Twingo! Cute little car with no air conditioning! Guess that we just have to roll down the windows. We head back to our hotel to pick up our clothes and check out, then on our way to the laundry mat. Again another experience, trying to figure out how to work everything and what spot in the washer the soap goes into! The dryer was 50 cents for 5 minutes and it would only allow you to put 50 cents at a time in. So every 5 minutes you have to go and put more money in and start the dryer again. Doesn’t seem a very good way to run a dryer to me. Laundry all done, just don’t know if the soap went in as prewash, wash or fabric softener! Well hopefully the clothes are some what clean. Off to our bed and breakfast, Les Orchidees, in a town called Blangy-Tronville. Blangy-Tronville is about a 15 minute drive from Amiens through some beautiful country blanketed with canola flowers (yellow). Very pretty! We arrive and met our hosts Patricia and Alain Corbiere who are very friendly folks. She takes us to our room, the Art Nouveau Room and it is simply lovely. We spent the afternoon reading, drinking wine and eating some bread with cheese and meat. Very enjoyable afternoon. We finally met Doreen, her great-great grandfather and Jeff's great-great grandfather are bothers. They were the only d'Heilly's that came to American. Doreen and Janele (her sister)called about 6:30 pm and wanted to meet with us. They have run into some bad luck, however, Janele got a blood clot in her leg and she has spent some time in the hospital. They were taken to a local hospital and it was not what they wanted, so the called the American Embassy and were taken to an American hospital where they felt the care was better. Bruno d’Heilly (Jeff’s second cousin) is picking us up and we are going to have a couple of beers with them! We ended up going to a high school friend of Bruno in a village called Bon Nay, about 15 minutes from us. They welcomed us 4 Americans into their home with champagne and appetizers. They spoke a little English and we had a great time with them. Off to dinner, Bruno called a restaurant in Bon Nay, Le Val d' Ancre and they were going to close soon, but would stay open for us. We had a wonderful dinner of beef in a cream sauce and mashed potatoes with an apple tart with ice cream for dessert and of course, we had some wine! |
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