How to Survive the French Car Pound

Contributor blog post by Jemma:

French Lessons welcomes 2017’s guest contributor: Rachael, our friend and dinner party guest whose evening ended badly. She’d only bid us ‘bonsoir’ when she promptly returned to Bellevue’s gate. A call to the police confirmed that yes, indeed, her car had been towed to Antibes’ pound.

Rachael drove our car home that night with plans to deal with her own, impounded vehicle the following morning.

Here Rachael shares her experience retrieving her car from the local fourrière. It is one bit of cultural instruction that French Lessons is delighted to learn secondhand.

…Continue reading here for details on Rachael’s story how she was able to extricate (finally) her car from the French car pound. Why you need a copy of your Carte Grise. And how she managed to keep her heart rate at 110 beats per minutes despite a bureaucratic nightmare. The last part might be the biggest feat.

Via:: French Lessons

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Tags:Carte Grise,Driving in France,Expat Living

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Jemma Hélène

Jemma was born and raised in the US Midwest. A banker by trade, she slogged away at a Swiss investment bank in the UK and South Africa before moving – for decent spaces of time, anyway – to the South of France. At a similar stage, she also moved to the right side of her brain as a writer. She has published articles in Maclean’s, SuperYacht World, and various travel and university presses.

At this point Jemma lives mostly in Canada, but she spends the whole of every summer in the Côte d’Azur town of Antibes. From this seaside town of ramparts, situated midway between Nice and Cannes, she has penned her blog French Lessons since 2007. Each post captures a snapshot of the remarkable, real life of the French Riviera. “Consider these pages my summertime gift to you,” she tells her readers.

When not engrossed in things French, Jemma is - not in any particular order - writing a book, making music, performing motherly duties, expanding sustainable education in places that have less of it, promoting Canadian writing, and travelling off-the-beaten-track: over 90 countries, and counting.

You can reach Jemma through her blog site at French Lessons.