After all our trips to France, and all our thinking or saying, “What a cool car, it looks so French. I bet it’s really awesome to drive, we should rent one someday…”, well TODAY we finally did it. We rented a Citroen 2CV, the quintessential French car, and drove the snot out of it all day! The 2CV is seen all over France as a classy runabout, a beat-up and abused farm tool, a daily-driver for huge numbers of families, and just an omnipresent mechanical device. They made millions of them in the years between 1948 and 1990, so they are everywhere! We’ve been distantly in love with them (well, Lynn more than me!) for 20+ years, today we put our love to the test.
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| Lynn and the 2CV |
Our rental was a 1987 2CV “Club” model. SO, it’s almost 30 years old now, even though it was one of the last ones manufactured. Yes, it is literally an antique. The design of this car changed very little during its 42 years of manufacture…so driving this thing was like stepping into a time machine. The design itself was revolutionary in the 1940’s and 1950’s: It was designed to allow French farmers to drive their crops and small livestock over rough fields and crude roads to the markets, without damage to the cargo or driver. The suspension is pillow soft and supple, so it rides like a huge marshmallow over almost anything. The engine is a horizontally-opposed 2 CYLINDER air-cooled monster, making almost no horsepower…think BMW motorcycle engine that never got any protein or exercise while growing up. 4-speed transmission , but not a sports car, just charasmatic as heck! The shifter in this car sticks out of the dashboard, and is a black ball attached to a thick horizontal steel rod. You PULL the ball back away from the dashboard for 1st gear, PUSH it forward and twist for 2nd gear, PULL it straight back out for 3rd gear, and after the engine finally sounds like it can use it, you PUSH the ball back toward the dashboard and twist it to achieve 4th gear. It's so fun to try to re-train your reflexes to deal with this shifting regime. All the work results in NO SPEED…we never drove more than 70 kilometers per hour (45-50 mph, I think), and that was about all our 2CV could handle!
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| Pick up the 2CV from rental agency in Beaune |
What else can I tell you about the car? Well, its looks are unique, and people either love it or hate it, I think. The roof arches for plenty of interior room; the canvas top can be rolled back completely open, so you can haul tall furniture or goats or sheep inside; arched windows give you all the periphery vision you could ever wish for; straight uncurved doors and windows make for easy replacement; sheetmetal parts like doors, fenders, hood, and boot all bolt on for easy repair or replacement (same with interior trim, all held on with exposed Phillips head screws). Lots more boring innovation to talk about, but just read the Wikipedia listing for “Citroen 2CV” if you'd like to know more! This thing is light as a feather, simple as an anvil, easy to understand and work on, and just funky as heck! Yup, French folks from every walk of life bought millions of these things.
Enough talk about the car, what’d we DO with it today, you say? Well, here goes. Our road trip was purposely limited only to small roads, with no high speed limit/multi-lane roads. Our plan was to see as many small towns and areas as we could, while heading for pretty chateaus, castles, or abbeys.
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| 1st stop - Pont d'Ouche canal, with canal boat moored1 |
First official stop was Pont d’Ouche, a tiny town on the Canal de Bourgogne. We took some pics of the car and the canal boats, then moved on to find an unexpected pretty chateau while driving through Commarin.
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| Accidental off-road trial for 2CV...this is the kind of terrain it was designed for |
Flavigny-sur-Ozerain was the next stop after a bunch of country driving, and some unwanted highway kilometers. This is the hard-to-get-to little village that was used as the setting for wonderful film from 10-15 years ago: “Chocolat”, which we watched again just last week. The town was beautiful, much bigger than you would suppose from the movie, but with convoluted and twisted streets and dead-ends which made it impossible to find the spots we saw in the movie. Get out and walk the city for a closer look? HAH, are you kidding??? We rented this 2CV to DRIVE…so we took off.
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L'Abbaye de Fontenay, Lynn and the 2CV
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| Lunch on a rock by the river channel L'Abbaye de Fontenay |
Perhaps our favorite stop was the L’Abbaye de Fontenay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was founded in the 12th century by Cistercian monks, and is still an active monastery today. The movie “Cyrano de Bergerac” starring Gerard Depardieu was also filmed there. It was lovely to see, set along a tranquil channel of the local river, and obviously well-kept by the monks or their helpers. We ate the picnic lunch Lynn made this morning: the traditional jambon et fromage baguette, with tomato and lettuce, eaten while seated on big rock by the water! Later, Lynn sampled driving the 2CV in the mostly-deserted parking lot of the monastery, and declared it “Good”. Then we switched drivers and beat it out of there for some more miles/kilometers.
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| Lynn in the vineyards on the hillside overlooking beautiful village of Arcenant |
We drove all over French farm country backroads for the next few hours. Arcenant was our next remarkable stop. We were back in the Cote d’Or wine country again, after an entire day of driving through non-grapes scenery. Most of our driving had been through country agriculture or forest land, with few towns or amenities. When we hit Arcenant, we were back among the valleys of vines!
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| Back into the vines above Arcenant |
Arcenant is relatively close to our home in Villers-la-Faye, but a little off from all the usual routes we travel, so we hadn’t yet seen it. What a beautiful view we found of this pretty town from the vineyards high above it. We took a bunch of 2CV pictures to remember the day, then hit the road again to drive through the town and on to Villers-le-Faye.
We stopped by our “home” and took some pictures of the car and house together (well, wouldn’t you?), then drove back to Beaune to return the rental after 9 hours of fun.
Of course, we’d acquired quite an appetite after this day of excitement and wrestling with the 2CV, so went prowling for a place to eat a quick supper. Yes, this is another blurb about FOOD! An unexpected surprise opportunity surfaced at the “Carrefours” grocery in Beaune. It’s set in a “community business center”, which turns out to be a small, nice shopping mall. The restaurant there was a French equivalent of Panera’s in the USA: good food at fast-food prices. The difference: all THIS fast food was prepared live, in sight, fresh. The fruit salad was being hand cut up while we watched, vegetables were prepared fresh and available buffet style (think "salad bar"), the fish and meat dishes were cooked in sight by a chef while we waited, and you could select a wine or beer to have with your meal right at the checkout counter. This was PERFECT, ‘cause we were beat. A wonderful meal, without investing a whole evening in the event the way we so often do at “regular” French restaurants. We’ll go back to this place again this trip! All in all, this was one fantastic day for US…I don't know if everyone would enjoy a day of traveling like we did, but this was epic!
Thanks for following what we’re up to. The blog and photos are a little slow in coming sometimes, as we get kind of caught up in DOING stuff or sleeping, instead of WRITING stuff or selecting photos. Please be patient, and we’ll have the pics attached and uploaded to our trip album very soon!
More trip photos than you could ever want are at this link!
TRIP PHOTOS
SPECIAL BONUS VIDEO!!! Here's how you drive a Citroen 2CV; the shifter is the most fun part:
2CV SHIFT Video
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