Our Trip To France – Part 5: Chilling Out, Cars And Tech
After our trip to the start of the Tour de France stage, my wife and I relaxed for a couple of days. For starters, we walked the kilometre from where we were staying to Gilhoc-sur-Ormèze to get freshly baked bread every morning. Something that I highly recommend as fresh from the oven bread in France is next level as far as we are concerned.
Here’s some pictures of the walk:
We also had to take our recycling to a designated location as there is no trash and recycling pickup. So we did a couple of walks over the last couple of days to do that as well. Here’s the location that we took it to:
We placed glass, plastics, and paper in the right bins. And we’re told that these bins are emptied once a week.
Gilhoc-sur-Ormèze is pretty rural where the main industry is farming as evidenced by these photos that my wife and I took on one of our walks:
Fun fact: On our first day here, we had a herd of cows walk by our front door. That was interesting to watch as we were not expecting that. But our hosts said it happens “all the time”.
These are sheep that are raised for their wool as well as for food.
These walks were a great way to close our rings on our respective Apple Watches. Speaking of tech, here’s what we brought with us to France:
I also decided to take this along as an experiment to see if it would work for international travel:
This is a power converter that is said to handle up to 2300W. The ideal is that you plug this into the wall using the supplied adapters, and it will step down the voltage from 220V/240V to 110V/120V. You then plug the devices that you have, computers or iPhones for example, into the USB-A or USB-C ports or the three outlets on the top. My thought was that this would create a single place to charge everything. Great plan. But I noticed a bunch of issues. For example, when both 140W power adapters were plugged into this device, one of the MacBooks would charge fine. The other would stop and stop charging every 30 seconds. And near the end of our stay, we were finding that our iPhones would have difficulty charging from the USB ports. Now it is possible that I have a defective unit which explains all of this. Regardless, I will likely not be using this again and I’ll be going back to using adapters for all the tech things when I travel.
As for the car, I drove the Peugeot 2008 that I have pictures of here. My driving impressions go something like this. It handles really well as it was more than capable of dealing the narrow, twisty roads in the area around Gilhoc-sur-Ormèze. While I did feel that it was capable of more, I never pushed it that hard. In terms of room, it fit 5 people (driver, front passenger, three adult rear passengers) in it. Though I suspect that you don’t want to put three people in the rear seats too often. If I had to compare it to a car that I’ve reviewed, it’s around the size of a Mazda CX-30. It also handles just as well.
Here’s a couple of extra things that I noticed:
It has a fully digital display that uses some sort of trickery to make your eyes think it’s 3D. It’s kind of neat. Though my wife thought it was a gimmick.
It had just enough room to fit both suitcases in the cargo area. But our computer bags needed to go on the floor behind the second row feet. There’s storage below the false floor.
The screen was easy to read. But this car didn’t have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in it. Which is odd as a Google search indicates that it is in theory a standard feature in this car. I ended up using my iPhone to navigate when required as I didn’t trust the built in navigation system. The reason being that some of the roads that we were on said “area not mapped” which you can see at the bottom left of the screen in the picture above.
One thing that took some getting used to was this gear shifter. It’s electronic and it took me a couple of days to get used to shifting into revers from drive and vice-versa. Also you have to press the “P” to put it into park. Different for sure. But like I said, I got used to it.
That’s all from France. The final post from this series will cover the trip back to Toronto. Stay tuned for that.
This entry was posted on July 29, 2023 at 9:30 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Our Trip To France – Part 5: Chilling Out, Cars And Tech
After our trip to the start of the Tour de France stage, my wife and I relaxed for a couple of days. For starters, we walked the kilometre from where we were staying to Gilhoc-sur-Ormèze to get freshly baked bread every morning. Something that I highly recommend as fresh from the oven bread in France is next level as far as we are concerned.
Here’s some pictures of the walk:
We also had to take our recycling to a designated location as there is no trash and recycling pickup. So we did a couple of walks over the last couple of days to do that as well. Here’s the location that we took it to:
We placed glass, plastics, and paper in the right bins. And we’re told that these bins are emptied once a week.
Gilhoc-sur-Ormèze is pretty rural where the main industry is farming as evidenced by these photos that my wife and I took on one of our walks:
Fun fact: On our first day here, we had a herd of cows walk by our front door. That was interesting to watch as we were not expecting that. But our hosts said it happens “all the time”.
These are sheep that are raised for their wool as well as for food.
These walks were a great way to close our rings on our respective Apple Watches. Speaking of tech, here’s what we brought with us to France:
I also decided to take this along as an experiment to see if it would work for international travel:
This is a power converter that is said to handle up to 2300W. The ideal is that you plug this into the wall using the supplied adapters, and it will step down the voltage from 220V/240V to 110V/120V. You then plug the devices that you have, computers or iPhones for example, into the USB-A or USB-C ports or the three outlets on the top. My thought was that this would create a single place to charge everything. Great plan. But I noticed a bunch of issues. For example, when both 140W power adapters were plugged into this device, one of the MacBooks would charge fine. The other would stop and stop charging every 30 seconds. And near the end of our stay, we were finding that our iPhones would have difficulty charging from the USB ports. Now it is possible that I have a defective unit which explains all of this. Regardless, I will likely not be using this again and I’ll be going back to using adapters for all the tech things when I travel.
As for the car, I drove the Peugeot 2008 that I have pictures of here. My driving impressions go something like this. It handles really well as it was more than capable of dealing the narrow, twisty roads in the area around Gilhoc-sur-Ormèze. While I did feel that it was capable of more, I never pushed it that hard. In terms of room, it fit 5 people (driver, front passenger, three adult rear passengers) in it. Though I suspect that you don’t want to put three people in the rear seats too often. If I had to compare it to a car that I’ve reviewed, it’s around the size of a Mazda CX-30. It also handles just as well.
Here’s a couple of extra things that I noticed:
It has a fully digital display that uses some sort of trickery to make your eyes think it’s 3D. It’s kind of neat. Though my wife thought it was a gimmick.
It had just enough room to fit both suitcases in the cargo area. But our computer bags needed to go on the floor behind the second row feet. There’s storage below the false floor.
The screen was easy to read. But this car didn’t have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in it. Which is odd as a Google search indicates that it is in theory a standard feature in this car. I ended up using my iPhone to navigate when required as I didn’t trust the built in navigation system. The reason being that some of the roads that we were on said “area not mapped” which you can see at the bottom left of the screen in the picture above.
One thing that took some getting used to was this gear shifter. It’s electronic and it took me a couple of days to get used to shifting into revers from drive and vice-versa. Also you have to press the “P” to put it into park. Different for sure. But like I said, I got used to it.
That’s all from France. The final post from this series will cover the trip back to Toronto. Stay tuned for that.
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This entry was posted on July 29, 2023 at 9:30 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.