Carrefour City – Grenoble, 22 cours Jean Jaures (1 review

Don't rent a car in Europe because it's expensive, slow and a pain-in-the-ass compared to public transport. Yeah, I get it "you don't mind long drives". I grew up road-tripping as a kid and once drove from Toronto to Ottawa for lunch so I know the feeling. However, you need to approach the trip differently when you take increased fuel costs/tolls/parking and the availability of public transport.
As a general rule, driving is not a very good way to get from point A to point B in most of the itineraries that we see on travel; in France, most people will think you're insane if you say "I'm going to rent a car in Paris to go to Nice for a weekend". That's at least nine hours behind the wheel, 77 EUR in tolls and about 80 EUR in fuel instead of a direct TGV in six hours (there's a train today for 70 EUR and you can find them for as low as 20 EUR). You also don't need to rent or park the TGV upon arrival ;).
All that said, buying a car in France was one of the best decisions that I made while living in Grenoble. Road trips to/in San Sebastian/Pamplona/Bordeaux, the Algarve, Barcelona, Corsica, Lake Como, Cassis/Les Calanques/Gorge du Verdun, Belgium/Luxembourg and Slovenia/Croatia were unforgettable and having a car was an amazing way to get off the (super-well-)beaten-trail. So I would highly recommend renting a car in Europe when the trip calls for it.
Anyway, here are some things that I think people should think about while deciding to rent or not in Europe. Keep in mind that most of my driving experience was in France and Northern Italy. In countries without tolls the costs will obviously go down.
Fuel * Right now in France you're looking at about 1.40 EUR per litre (2.20 CAD per litre, or 6 USD per gallon). At that price, it would have cost me 120 CAD to fill up my car! * Highways will have the most expensive fuel, followed by brand-name gas stations. I bought almost all my fuel at the big grocery stores (Carrefour, Casino, Leclerc and the like).
Tolls * The French highway system is great, I miss the hell out of it every time I get back on a 400-series highway in Ontario * But you pay for it. Over the two years I had my car, I spent almost as much on tolls as I did on diesel. * One really rough example is Grenoble to Turin. It's under three hours but you'll rack up 16 EUR to get to the Italian border + 45 EUR for the Fréjus Tunnel + 14 EUR to get the rest of the way to Turin. Flixbus would cost 15-20 EUR. * Italy takes this a step further with ZTLs. Did you miss this sign? Now you've got a fine coming! * Some countries require you to have a sticker in order to use their highways. In Switzerland this is 40 CHF whether you use the highway for a day or a year. * Note: you can use ViaMichelin to get an idea of tolls and fuel costs
Parking * If you're used to parking in wide-open lots for free then this is the stuff of nightmares. If you're parallel parking on-street in a French city then there's a very good chance that you'll be making bumper contact with the cars in front and behind you. * unless you're in the countryside you'll probably be paying (maybe out the nose) for parking. I paid 50 EUR to park for two nights in Barcelona. * Theft of belongings is a huge problem. An unscientific poll of my friends shows like 90% of them having had a window smashed and something stolen at least once
Sometimes a rental is a great idea, sometimes it's an unbelievably poor one. The important thing to do is to actually evaluate your options and figure out what works best for you.

• Ask yourself if you really need it? You may only need a rental for a few days in the middle of the trip, especially if doing so can help you avoid one-way drop-off fees. You certainly don't need the car because you want to be flexible during your week in Venice-Rome-Florence!
• Use ViaMichelin (website or app) to get an idea of tolls. Occasionally choosing one highway over another can save you a fair amount.
• Use online aggregates to find the best deal
• Keep the parking situation in mind when you're planning something. AirBnB's are notorious for saying "free parking" when really they mean "you can park somewhere in the neighbourhood" that may-or-may-not be free.
• Learn how to drive a manual. Even if you reserve an automatic, it's not a 100% guarantee that they'll have one when you get to the desk.

What have your experiences with rental cars been like?
Have you rented a car and wished you didn't need to find parking in Amsterdam and Brussels? Or have you tried to visit a chain of far-flung villages before wishing you'd taken a rental?

Why Donald Trump is No Good……
Yeah, you’ve heard people argue this before. No, this isn’t another example of some ‘woke’ leftist showing all the symptoms of ‘Orange Man Bad’ syndrome. It’s also not a fluff piece from a far-right bigot. In fact my only goal for this piece of writing is not to belittle the beliefs, thoughts and opinions of other’s or to garner the admiration of those who share a similar disposition to myself, but rather to fill a niche in the overcrowded space of people criticizing the man. In the sea of hatred for this one person there is a shortage of calm, reasonable, explanations for why he is not a good fit for leading the nation.
People have argued he’s a sexist, a bigot and a criminal. Most of those people I’d wager have never actually met the real man. Neither have I so I’ll reserve judgement on how he acts around other people in private. All I can comment on is what is displayed to the public, and admittedly there is a possibility that the man we see is different than the man we don’t see. Perhaps there isn’t a difference either, but again I simply don’t know so I won’t make an ass of myself (anymore than I do on a regular basis) and try to speculate where possible.
I want to lay out some historical facts here as far as where he came from and what he has done. To begin with, he came from money.
The whole ‘small loan of a million dollars’ meme has been played out and who would I be if I beat that dead horse anymore, so I won’t stoop there. Simply put though, Donald’s grandfather was a German immigrant who was an entrepreneur in every sense of the word. The man was a barber turned saloon owner turned investor and surely left his son, Fred Trump (Donald’s Dad) a good starting point to accomplish what he would go on to do. Fred Trump was a New York area landlord and real-estate developer. He owned apartment buildings, developed new properties to add to his portfolio and made a healthy fortune doing so.
Enter The Donald.
Whether he only took the claimed million dollar loan to get started in real estate back in the seventies or if he also employed the benefit of his fathers contacts and existing real estate holdings to bolster the growth of what would come to be known as ‘Trump Enterprises’ is asinine to even question.
Trump joined his father’s company at age 22 and over time branched off to develop his own deals and business holdings as his father began to wind down his activity and enter pseudo retirement. No shame in that, no harm and no foul, just simply how it goes. When Fred Trump died in 1999 his net worth was estimated somewhere around 250-300 million and was presumably split between his many children.
I’m not going to question the validity of his statement that he (Donald) is a ‘self-made’ man. I’ll let you decide that one for yourself. What I am pointing out though is, he grew up as the son of a wealthy New York real-estate developer, and from an early age began a career as a wealthy New York and later global real estate developer.
He finished college in 1968 and avoided having to go to Vietnam, though one can’t fault him for that any more than they could fault George Bush Jr. for serving in the air national guard or for Bill Clinton avoiding it entirely just as you couldn’t really fault anyone for not wanting to die in a jungle halfway around the world, so again, no harm no foul.
In the seventies he began investing in properties and by the time the eighties rolled around he was a well-known figure around New York and in the tabloids. He began leveraging the equity he had in existing buildings to buy new ones (a fancy way of saying he took out a big mortgage to buy another property), which can be a smart move by anyone’s count so long as you play your cards right. Things panned out and he had the opportunity to invest in some casino’s in Atlantic City. They we’re cash cows and drove him to double down on his successes until they became excesses and eventually, he was so over stretched with debt and expenses accrued from the construction of his latest casino project in Atlantic city, he decided to declare a strategic bankruptcy.
He had fallen from grace so to speak but managed to salvage some assets and over the course of the next decade made concerted efforts to rebuild his image (and his wealth), going so far as to host a reality TV show and commenting on politics, and well you know the rest of the story.
That’s the brief history; the condensed and light version of the life and times of Donald Trump. Now consider his constituency. He is hailed by those who would hail him, as a champion of the working man. A man who cares about restoring the prosperity of the middle class, cracking down on illegal immigration and global trade perceived as being not in this country’s favor. I’ve heard him referred to as a ‘populist’ and a ‘real’ politician. Whether you like him or not he is known for speaking his mind freely and openly, off the cuff, and often without a prompter or pre-written speech.
Even if you don’t find him an eloquent public speaker, you have to admit it’s different to hear someone in politics talk the way he does. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, that for a politician to speak freely and openly about his motives and goals is a good thing. That to rid oneself of the filtered down, mass appeal garnering middle of the road pandering psychobabble we’ve grown accustomed to both in politics and in the corporate world, is refreshing to a degree.
This is what I see as being his primary appeal. He doesn’t sound like a normal politician. In fact, the conventional politicians associated with a system seen as slow, bureaucratic and self-indulgent all fought in vein to suppress his efforts towards taking the white house. Even people in his own party we’re against him and so you have this sort of outsideunderdog/maverick/self-confident savage of a man blasting his way through the status quo and putting on a good show along the way.
At this point you might be wondering, what the hell am I mentioning all this for if the title of the article is ‘Why Donald Trump is No Good’.
Well here’s why; he’s full of shit.
Nothing actually distinguishes him from any other politician in Washington other than the tactics he used to get there and how he conducts himself publicly. Other than that, the underlying machine is the same. It is self-serving and narcissistic. It pretends to care about the plight of those in a class far different than itself, and it works to create a certain image for itself for others to rally behind.
I find a wonderfully tragic from of irony present itself when a member of the working class proclaims this wealthy New York real-estate developer known for shrewd deal making and having a solid gold toilet has their goals in mind. If you paint broad strokes about it sure he may, but if you narrow in on what’s important to him versus the common man? If you compare his value system or any other rich 'yuppy' from 1980’s Manhattan with a farmer in Iowa, a rancher in Montana, a carpenter in Georgia or a factory worker in Detroit, you’re going to find incompatibilities.
When the man declared bankruptcy after his last casino project failed, he stiffed contractors building the thing for millions of dollars, putting many of those companies out of business if not merely hurting their bottom line.
Any contractor out there who is a trump supporter, I want you to imagine the owner of a building site you’re working on stiffing you and every other contractor for the money you rightfully earned and then voting for that same guy to go lead your nation and fight the greed and self-indulgence ever present in Washington D.C. It just simply does not compute. The man is interested in self perseverance and you know what god dammit, that’s okay! It’s not a crime to make money and screw other people over within a certain legal boundary of doing so. It is however, unethical, immoral, and the action of a man not concerned with the plight of the average working person and if he tells you anything on the contrary he’s lying through his teeth.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t any different on a base level. In fact, she was worse. The status-quo career politician looking to assert dominance and influence over others while appearing likable to the public is a classic motif as old as civilization really. That means on top of everything aforementioned above, she like most other politicians didn’t even feel inclined to innovate their approach towards seizing power.
You may ask, “what did Trump do that was so great?” Well I’ll tell you.
What Trump did that was so revolutionary in my opinion, is he simply embraced what the role of the president really is, or at least what it’s become; a salesman.
All a president is anymore, really, is a mouth peace for the board of directors that would otherwise call the shots. I mean really the old idea of how our government operates is on its last leg if not completely dead. The last time we legally declared war was when we declared on Japan in WWII. Every conflict since then, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, shadow operations in Africa and other CIA operations in various countries around the world (panama, Grenoble, etc.) we’re not voted on by congress as a declaration of formal warfare. We simply allocated the money and troops and away we went. Corporations can donate unlimited amounts of money to politicians anonymously per a supreme court decision not even decade old, and a normal citizen can’t muster the financial and bureaucratic resources it takes to dismantle the ever growing power and influence of the Federal Agencies which now in lieu of voted in officials design the policies that effect our daily lives. A president of the United States is not totally powerless though, as he certainly needs to command respect to maintain the illusion of authority. He can enact certain policies and make important decisions just like a president of a company would. They ‘sell’ the general public on, or rather convince them the direction the country is heading is for the best and on track. Every state of the Union address is essentially just a scripted reassurance everything’s on track despite any set back that presents itself at the time. And really every speech is the same way to a certain degree, at least up until Donald Trump took office. What Donald did is use his entrepreneurial instinct to exploit a niche in the market for new presidents.
I mean, following the collapse of his casino’s and the retraction of his real estate holdings in the early nineties the man rebuilt his image as a Brand Name more than anything of substance. He didn’t manufacture anything, but rather he put his logo on things other companies made, just as many large companies do, and he marketed himself. He sold the general public an image of himself that conveyed certain things he wanted to convey, in order to make money. Just as he did with mail order steaks and board games he has done with the Presidency. That is, he put his unique stamp on the thing and sold it to whoever would buy, and more than half the people who voted in the last election for president, bought what he was selling.
Every four years our nation considers ‘buying’ a new president. Companies use money to fund their campaigns and individuals use votes to ultimately pick out a new public spokesman for the government. Really, it’s more like leasing than buying if you think about it.
Picture one of those roads in a town near you where all the dealerships are. There’s some Ford, Honda and Chrysler dealerships on one side and some Chevy, Toyota and Kia dealerships on the other. All the cars are comparable, they all have similar features, they all have a range of options but ultimately look sort of similar to each other relative to their own respective class (i.e. trucks look like trucks, sedans look like sedans and so on), some are cheaper, some are more reliable, some come in different colors and others don’t seem like as good of a value. Ultimately though they are relatively homogenized and not too dissimilar from the other. That’s the normal political landscape in a nutshell. A guy with a red tie or a blue tie. A lady in a pan suit who wants gun control or a lady in a pan suit who like border control.
Then all of a sudden, a new company called Tesla starts selling cars online, and they’re electric, and they’re fast, and they look cool. Some people ignore them, others find reason to hate them, and yet more point out the ideas been around for a long time already, but now enough people in the market to get a new car are captivated by how different they are. The fact that they run on different fuel than gasoline and hell, you can’t even buy them the same way; they become available in a whole new platform. Even if the company failed after a few years the shakeup it has on the marketplace is long reaching and everlasting up to a point, but at the end of the day, despite how different the approach, style and substance, it’s still a car. Its main function is to move you from point a to point b and the person making them wants to sell them to you.
Now whereas a different kind of car may seem beneficial, a different kind of politician is not. There’s a reason it was in poor taste to accept the nomination for president in this country when it first came to be an available position. The idea of a person who aspired to have power over others and to call the shots on such a scale seemed in poor taste, and so many of the first presidents, following the template laid forth by the very first president himself, would feign disinterest in such a nomination.
Perhaps it’s better now that politicians are more honest about their ambition. At the very least we can see through their guise a bit better. That is, if we care to look, and I fear that most just don’t want to see what lies before their eyes.
So, what’s the takeaway here?
Don’t hate him because he belongs to a different political party than you, don’t hate him because he is a different color than you, don’t hate him because he is a different gender than you, don’t hate him because he’s a boomer, and most of all, don’t hate him because you disagree with his stance on certain political issues. In fact, don’t hate him at all.
Just don’t support a person who’s obviously pretending to care about you when all the facts say otherwise.