We had a long trip back to Paris, but my friend Jean Philippe had suggested we stop in Lyon, so we stopped to visit the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière, which was built on top of the Fourvière hill in the late 1800s and is absolutely stunning.
We made it back to downtown Paris with only minutes to spare—and then we hit the Etoile traffic circle. Etoile is not your typical traffic circle: it's the junction of twelve important avenues, it's about 10 lanes wide, and the very large and distracting Arc de Triomphe sits in the middle. In addition, you don't have the right-of-way when you're in the traffic circle, like you do everywhere else; you have the right-of-way when you drive into the traffic circle. This was my first time driving around the Arc de Triomphe, and of course it had to be at night, so while it's a piece of cake getting into the traffic circle, once you're in it it's not so easy getting back out. We had to keep yielding to incoming traffic from all the other streets and we were not able to get out on our street. In fact, we were not able to get out on the following street either and ended up having to make this crazy detour to reach our destination. We got to Hertz at 8:59 PM, as they were turning off the lights, and although le monsieur at the counter did not seem happy about it he did his best not to show it.
