We had a long trip back to Paris, but a friend had suggested we stop in Lyon, which was on our way, to visit the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière, a church that was built in the late 1800s on top of the Fourvière hill overlooking the city and is absolutely stunning.
There was heavy traffic as we neared Paris and it was getting close to 9 PM, but we still had a few minutes to spare as we made our way toward the Hertz office — 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 inside 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 the traffic coming in from all the avenues and were not able to get out on the street we needed to and ended up having to make a crazy detour to reach our destination. We got to Hertz at exactly 8:59 PM as they were turning off the lights, and although the agent did not seem happy about it, he did his best not to show it.
