Totally Frenched Out

From the blogger formerly known as Samdebretagne

Monday, September 28, 2009

Slow down Richard

My boss was here with me the other week, and we took the TGV from Paris to Angers to go visit some of my clients. He and his sons are really interested in trains, so he was pretty excited to be on a real TGV.

One thing that surprised him though was that it didn't seem like we were actually going that fast. I pulled out my iphone and looked up the fastest speed they are allowed to run (320km/hr). He wasn't convinced we were going anywhere near that fast, so we decided to pull out my GPS and see if it could get a satellite connection. And while we never got up to 320, we did get up to a pretty zippy 303 km/h (or 188 mph). The funniest part though was that whenever we would near a road, the GPS would start freaking out and saying "You're over the speed limit. You're over the speed limit!!", and show a little 90 km/hr sign next to our speed. It was absolutely freaking hilarious.

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10 Comments:

Blogger L said...

"Faites demi-tout dès que possible"

September 28, 2009 at 12:05 PM  
Blogger Eileen said...

lol, that is awesome.

September 28, 2009 at 12:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

wicked. :0)

September 28, 2009 at 2:00 PM  
Blogger Andrea said...

Hey Sam! Off topic...

Do you mind sharing which GPS you have and if it's any good? I have a Mio but it won't let me add the Eastern Europe maps I bought so now I have to buy a new GPS. Do you recommend yours?

September 28, 2009 at 2:37 PM  
Blogger Ksam said...

I have a Takara GP48 - I bought it for around 90-100€, and so far it's been fine and has a really nice, big screen. The only thing I don't like is that there isn't an option to not take really tiny country roads, but that shouldn't be an issue for your average driver. I think it has 28 different countries pre-loaded??

September 28, 2009 at 3:06 PM  
Blogger Sharyn Ekbergh said...

We love the TGV, we took it to Avignon from CDG. And we used a GPS to drive around France, a Garmin. It worked almost flawlessly except for one time it told us to take the wrong exit from a roundabout. Other than that it was perfect.

September 28, 2009 at 6:52 PM  
Blogger MilkJam said...

LOL nerd :-)

September 28, 2009 at 10:06 PM  
Blogger A Tank said...

haha that's hilarious.

September 29, 2009 at 5:24 AM  
Blogger wcs said...

When I was in grad school, I worked on a study of high-speed rail technology and the TGV in particular. On a research trip, my professor and I got to ride in the driver's cab on the TGV between Paris and Le Mans (the service was new then). They also let Ken come with us just for fun!

You can really sense the speed up there because the landscape is coming at you instead of going by you. Also, the cab is much more noisy than the passenger compartments.

I've always been impressed by the sensation that you're really not moving that fast on the TGV. It's intentional, and done quite well!

September 29, 2009 at 8:16 AM  
Blogger Andrea said...

I've never heard of the Takara. I'll have to look into that. Otherwise I think I'll just get a TomTom, which every man and his dog seems to have.

September 30, 2009 at 1:53 PM  

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