French back roads and small hamlets —

Avoiding the interstates, toll roads and taking our time — yes even your brother, brother-in-law, uncle and dear friend Paul, is driving rather slow. Not precisely sure where he and lovely wife are going all the time, despite on board presence of Hertz "Never Lost" GPS.  Little do they know!

Once we made up our minds not to go city centre to city centre, via the fastest route, the ole Tom Tom is pretty much a bust except for a redirect after you get underway. So we try to out fox it by picking little towns along the way. Then sometimes while looking at a map sometimes yours truly has a "better idea" on how to get somewhere and we even confuse our on board computer even more. We are glad to have it though because in the end we can get generally where we want to go.

The country side is quite beautiful here in the Picardy region of France.

I don't know how we missed a picture without a tractor in the photo but somehow we did. There have been many of these fields with John Deere tractors pulling large farm implements.

And the small towns, many not on the Michelin map nor on "Never Lost" but on the road between Compiegne and Scissions and Reims, or some other town, midway between where we were headed, there are many.

not all the farm houses looked prosperous, some looked slightly abandoned.

and some parts of some of the towns looked somewhat forsaken.

and the roads were definitely less traveled.

other towns were obviously doing well, and had plenty of life, or at least cars parked on the side of the road.

Matt, I told ya in some places it looks like North Dakota.

See.

Other places sure look like France.

and from studying the map I occasionally get  the idea that it appears as if we can take a short cut.  So Patt at my direction turns down a narrow country road and off the route selected by Never Lost.   Well guess what, the intersection on the map that we had to drive through on our short cut turned out to be a five points when Patt asked "where now?" It turned out that I picked the wrong point. Patt, driving, pointed that out to me too. We passed the same tractor three times. We were not in a picture taking mood at that point.

Changing the subject. On other roads we did see some pretty fields. Some time I will tell you about Patt driving down a road that turned into a dirt track — perhaps. No photos of that either.

and in some town we passed this old faded glory mansion.  Saw it out of the corner of our eye and stopped and backed up to see it. Looked like a place for one of the Crawley's from Downton Abby to go visit while in France.

We are genuinely enjoying driving back roads, intend to keep on doing it. Stopping in those towns to find something to drink or eat has been a challenge as English is really not spoken and our French is not so good despite smiling a lot. Some of the French, and Belgians too, have obviously thought that even though we indicated we did not understand, all it took was just more talking, and so they explained more and more earnestly. Often with hand motions too. I smile and nod and say "merci".

Having a wonderful time.
Merci Merci