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Report 1939: Chateaux, Rillettes, Sunflowers, Mistral and Tour de France Triumphal Finish

By Anastasia from Canada, Summer 2011

Page 2 of 28: Arriving to CDG and Picking up Our Car

Brantome

No sparkling wine anymore on Air France, but we each had as much wine as we wanted and a little bottle of Porto each. Our flight had a lot of turbulence especially at the time of landing. The pilot had to go low for a long time to approach the airport, but the crew members weren't buckled in. I found it rather scary.

So we arrived at 8am. We spent some time in the line for security, and then getting our bags was fast, they were the only ones on the belt. We went directly to the Europcar counter. There were two or three people before us. We waited maybe 30 minutes. The man at the desk was pretty efficient. I had prepaid with autoeurope.ca with Visa insurance covering us. He offered to upgrade us to an automatic Mercedes with no environmental fees, basically for the same price. We weren't sure. Since we were staying in camping areas and not in castles, we thought it was wise to go with an ordinary car. In case of a problem, the repair costs wouldn't be prohibitive and we didn't want someone to break in. Also the Renault Modus was a diesel and economic car. This was a good decision as we found out later we didn't have any problems parking or entering impasses, which would have been impossible with a bigger car.

Our car was waiting for us. So we walked to the kiosk in the parking area and got our keys very fast. Other people were waiting for their cars even though they did pass before us inside the airport. I had called autoeurope.ca before leaving to readjust our pickup time by two hours.

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