Just got back from a lovely Easter break in Villelongue de la Salanque, a quiet little village near Perpignan in southern France. Dad and I drove down in Dad's '05 Fiat Panda, with Mum and my sister flying out to meet us a couple of days later. A quick summary of what seem to be the rules of the road in France.
1) Don't give way to anything.
2) Especially if signs say you must.
3) Speed limits are targets, feel free to comfortably exceed them.
4) Cyclists are allowed to ride anywhere they please, ignore any signals that they want, and annoy whoever they want to.
5) You must wait for around 5-6 seconds after a traffic light has gone green before considering the possibility of thinking about formulating a plan to come up with a strategy regarding how you intend to move off. Admittedly, the procedure is actually the same each time....but you still need to plan it out on each occasion.
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On a somewhat lighter note, I enjoyed my first driving experience on the continent. We took the Dover-Boulogne crossing on the cat-type ferry, drove to Chartres and stayed overnight, then drove to Clermont-Ferrand and from there down the country, over the Massif Central and down towards Perpignan. The Panda is a nice little car to go bombing around in, especially with the 1.3 MultiJet TD engine and the big sunroof. Oh, and the drive down is made totally worth it by the Millau Viaduct.....it truly is a beautiful piece of engineering, with the added bonus that you save about 4-6 hours of narrow winding roads and traffic jams that you used to encounter by going anywhere near Millau
1) Don't give way to anything.
2) Especially if signs say you must.
3) Speed limits are targets, feel free to comfortably exceed them.
4) Cyclists are allowed to ride anywhere they please, ignore any signals that they want, and annoy whoever they want to.
5) You must wait for around 5-6 seconds after a traffic light has gone green before considering the possibility of thinking about formulating a plan to come up with a strategy regarding how you intend to move off. Admittedly, the procedure is actually the same each time....but you still need to plan it out on each occasion.
Public Information Broadcast brought to you by JRS Ltd.
On a somewhat lighter note, I enjoyed my first driving experience on the continent. We took the Dover-Boulogne crossing on the cat-type ferry, drove to Chartres and stayed overnight, then drove to Clermont-Ferrand and from there down the country, over the Massif Central and down towards Perpignan. The Panda is a nice little car to go bombing around in, especially with the 1.3 MultiJet TD engine and the big sunroof. Oh, and the drive down is made totally worth it by the Millau Viaduct.....it truly is a beautiful piece of engineering, with the added bonus that you save about 4-6 hours of narrow winding roads and traffic jams that you used to encounter by going anywhere near Millau
You would have had a better experience driving in Germany 
