Chinese tourists take a roundabout pilgrimage to Lourdes - 800 kms away

It's easily done isn't it?

You arrive at an airport, rent a car, complete with GPS or SatNav, and tap in your destination.

If you're lucky the thing will direct you to exactly where you want to go without any problem.

If you're not, or are hopeless at following instructions, then you could end up taking a route which will allow you to see a little more of the countryside than you had intended.

The chances are though, that you'll eventually reach where you want to be.

Both scenarios of course rely upon your having entered the correct town or city.

But there remains another possible outcome: arriving miles away from your intended journey's end.

(screenshot Mappy  - the green flag is Paris, the yellow one Leuhan, and the red flag is Lourdes)

That's exactly what happened this past weekend to a group of Chinese tourists who had arrived at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris from Los Angeles and decided to hire a car with a GPS, to drive to the southwestern town of Lourdes.

Except they ended up over 800 kilometres away in the village of Leuhan in Brittany, in the west of the country.

As the regional daily Ouest France reported the five women had indeed entered Lourdes into the GPS but they had forgotten to include the number of the département: hence they arrived in the village where the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes can be found.

An easy mistake to make!

"They got out of their car and asked me where they could find their hotel," Manée Peron, the owner of the village bar-tobacconist Ti Manée, told the newspaper.

"But when I looked at the reservation slip they showed me I saw that they were looking for Lourdes in the southwest of France and I told them they were in completely the wrong place."

Not surprisingly the women were apparently more than a little fed up but reprogrammed their GPS, and were on their way once again...to the correct Lourdes.

Let's just hope their rental contract allowed them unlimited mileage.

"Hey honey, where's Junior?" Parents "forget" son at a roadside rest area

"Home alone" might only have been a 1990 film dreamt up by scriptwriters as a comedy in which Macaulay Culkin played the part of an eight-year-old boy mistakenly left behind when his parents fly off to Paris for their Christmas hols.

But let's face it, fact can be - and often is - stranger than fiction as the parents of an eight-year-old French boy can attest to after their weekend "lapse of memory".

They reportedly "forgot" their son on the side of the road, leaving him at a rest area and only realising he was missing half an hour later.

Lourdes Basilica (Wikipedia, author Milorad Pavlek)

The couple from the suburbs of Paris were on their way to the market town of Lourdes at the foot of the Pyrénées in southwestern France.

It is of course famous as a destination for Catholic pilgrimage and alleged miraculous healings.

They had set off on their holidays early on Saturday morning; mum, dad and three children in a camping car.

The roads were pretty busy with holidaymakers, just as they are every Saturday in August in France.

As Agence France Presse reports, at around nine o'clock in the evening, after having completed just over 700 of their 800 kilometre journey, the couple decided to take a break, and they stopped at a rest area on the nationale 21 in the département of Gers.

A few minutes later, refreshed and ready for the final stretch, they set off again, and it was only when they arrived in Lourdes that they realised one of their children was missing.

They immediately rang the emergency services, to be told that their son was with the police who had been alerted by other motorists who had seen the child alone at the rest area.

About turn - they were reunited with him a couple of hours later.

So, how could parents apparently "forget" one of their children?

It sounds even weirder than the recent case of the man who left his wife at the side of the road in the dead of night without realising she was missing.

That also happened in the southwest of France - is there something in the water perhaps?

Well there's a simple and innocent enough explanation according to the national daily France Soir.

When the family stopped, all three children were apparently asleep in the back of the camping car.

But while the parents stretched their legs, the eight-year-old slipped out without them noticing.

So they didn't really "forget" him. They just didn't realise he wasn't there.

In their infinite wisdom, the police have decided not to pursue the case, putting it all down to fatigue and a momentary lack of attention at the end of a long journey.

Maybe though, as the regional daily Midi Libre comments, the couple will light up a candle or two in thanks at their final destination.

One thing is for certain - it's a holiday neither the boy nor his parents will forget in a hurry.