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.

A French couple's "toothsome" lunchtime discovery

A gentle warning before you read any further, especially if you're just about to sit down to eat.

The following tale might put you off your grub.

(from Wikipedia, author Rainer Z)

That's certainly the effect it had on a couple in the western French town of Guérande on the coast of Brittany

Retired policeman Jean-Paul Dosset and his wife Claudine, had defrosted some chipolatas and put them on the grill to share with family and friends for lunch on Monday.

And all was well until, as the regional daily Ouest France reports, Claudine bit into one of the sausages and discovered of all things...a tooth.

Well to be precise it was a post crown; not exactly the most appetising accompaniment to the meal and one which, not surprisingly really, rather put the couple and their guests off their food.

"There were chipolatas, steak haché (mince) and chips on the menu," 61-year old Dosset said on Laurent Ruquier's daily round-table radio show "On va s’gêner" on Europe 1

"We're a large family and we didn't know how many people would be coming to lunch," he continued.

"My wife took a mouthful of chipolata and felt something hard, first of all thinking it was a bone.

"But after she discovered what it was, that was curtains for the main course and we went straight to the dessert - a yoghurt."

Their cat ate the rest of the sausages and lunch on Tuesday was fish.

The manufacturer of the chipolata, Défial Normival, is more than a little non-plussed about how the offending tooth apparently managed to make its way inside the sausage in the first place, as the director of quality control, Cédric Loyer told Ouest France the day after the story first hit the headlines

"The meat passes through several processes of cutting and mincing," he told the paper.

"It's impossible that the tooth managed to get through without being detected or being marked in any way."

The Dossets don't intend to ask for compensation, but they still have the tooth and have written a letter to Défial Normival, repeating their story.

Meanwhile the company is reportedly waiting for a "complete analysis" before making any further comment.

This latest "toothsome" discovery comes just a month after a couple from the western city of Angers found a post crown - complete with root - in their lunchtime steak haché.

As the French say, "Bon appetit".

Corinne Brosseau - a true heroine.

Corinne Brosseau is a true heroine.

She might claim not to be one, but Stéphane, a 40-year-old wheelchair-bound man from the western French town of Bouguenais, certainly thinks she is.

Corinne Brosseau (screenshot BFM TV report)

Brosseau saved his life, pulling him out of the path of a train reportedly travelling at 170 kilometres an hour.

As Stéphane told the regional daily Ouest France, he was taking the level crossing in the town just as he did every day to go to work.

"I was right in the middle of the crossing when I heard the bell go and saw the barriers come down," he said.

"And for some reason - I don't know why - my wheelchair got stuck in the tracks," he continued.

"I could hear a train coming. I was terrified."

Luckily for him though, it was at that moment that Brosseau arrived to rescue him - and she only just managed.

"It was raining, the barriers had gone down and I could see there was a man in a wheelchair in the middle of the crossing clearly unable to move," she told Europe 1 radio.

"I got out of my car, rushed over to him and after a couple of attempts managed to pull him from his chair to the side of the track and out of the path of an oncoming train."

Her quick thinking and actions undoubtedly saved Stéphane's life because the train hit the wheelchair full on, leaving it fit only for the scrap yard.

(screenshot BFM TV report)

But Brosseau remained modest about the part she played in the rescue.

"I only did what anyone would have done under the circumstances," she said, admitting that her arms had ached for the rest of the day.

"It was instinctive and I'm convinced that we all have it in us to find the strength to do what's necessary," she added.

But for Stéphane there's no doubting that she's his heroine.

"She's an extraordinary woman," he told BFM TV.

"She saved my life."

Hot air balloon causes train delays in western France

Now that's not the sort of headline you see every day - not even here in France.

Trains were delayed on the TGV line between Nantes in western France and Paris for the best part of Saturday morning.

Not so unusual, you might be thinking, given French national railways' (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer français, SNCF) track (ouch) record.

But this disruption wasn't down to industrial action, the weather or even suspected sabotage.

(screenshot - France 3 television news report)

Instead it occurred after a hot air balloon hit an overhead power line.

The balloon was one of several, according to the regional daily Ouest-France, that had taken off early on Saturday morning from Oudon, 30 kilometres east of Nantes.

It belonged to Nantes Montgolfières, which describes its flights over the Loire valley as "unforgettable".

An apt description indeed - not so much for the journey the eight passengers and one pilot undertook - but the landing they experienced just as they were about to touch down in a field.

Apparently, caught off guard by a stronger-than-expected wind, the pilot wasn't able to prevent the balloon's fabric from becoming entangled with a nearby 25,000 volt overhead power line.

"There could have serious consequences," Captain Patrice Bongibault, a high-ranking police officer told regional France 3 television news.

"But only two of the passengers were slightly injured."

(source - Wikipedia)

And that was a point stressed by the director of Nantes Montgolfières, Géry Liagre.

"We take thousands of people into the air over the Loire Valley and such an incident is very rare," he said.

"Of course it shouldn't have happened, but nobody was seriously injured and in fact there was nothing dramatic: we just disrupted SNCF for a couple of hours."

Oh well that's all right then.

And anyway, train passengers are used to experiencing delays for one reason or another.

210511 - Une montgolfière sur une voie de chemin de fer Vidéo Fred-Lille sélectionnée dans Actualité