On the road back to Belgium: reflections on driving in France during our summer vacation

It's mid-november and I'm almost done with my posts about our summer vacation in France :D.  Bear with me just 2 more posts.  

The plan/ our intention

We had designed our vacation through France as a partial roadtrip. The main reason was to avoid traffic on the north-south highways in France in the changing weekends.  The idea that I'd be bumpering on those overloaded traffic jams drives me crazy.  You need to know that I don't do driving on unknown environments and busy traffic well.  It's a sticky left-over from past phobia's that I tried to beat, but this one remains.   But it's hard when in France most vacation locations rent out from Saturday to Saturday. 

But we had one month of parental leave so plenty of time to be flexible, hence the idea to chop up the drive to the south in multiple shorter stages that wind through this beautiful country like a roadtrip: a bit of Alsace, a bit of Bourgogne, a bit of Champagne, a bit of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, ... Each day 3-4 hours of driving leaving us half a day to visit and stop and relax. That was the plan. Similarly to all the roadtrips we've already done in the USA and Canada in the last decade. 

The reality
In reality it didn't feel so relaxing to me at all.   My stress and anxiety for driving on unknown potentially busy roads for hours hit in full force again, so I regretted having a full 7 days with hours of driving scheduled.  It was 7 days of stress in the end, especially in order to hit the road each time.  Maybe I should have planned less driving days after all. 

Also the theoretical 3-4 hours of driving calculated in winter, isn't always in reality 3-4 hours of driving. Especially on Friday-Sunday in the south of France the traffic jams are monstrous even when those weekends are not marked as red or black.  I can't imagine what black weekends would be like. 

I thought we'd be on the road but stopping constantly to visit this or that.  But once on a highway, it's highly unlikely to take each exit to go and see if there is something worthwhile to visit. Unlike the Canadian Rockies where you drive on one scenic road all along and you stop at pull-outs or viewpoints or parking lots for a short hike to a cascade or so, it's now much less clear where to stop for what.  We hadn't prepared it in such detail.  The best strategy to make sufficient stops and discovery is to stay on departmental roads from start to end.  But then I noticed that all of us, despite some stops now and then, quickly keep an eye on the remaining time to destination and get in the mood of "let's just move on and get there" because the remaining time just doesn't decrease otherwise.  (and yes, as driver, I was also looking forward to arriving and being able to get a glass of local wine). 

Additionally, we could not have foreseen the incredible heatwave that was ongoing last summer.  Arriving in the afternoon in Strasbourg, Vichy, Avalon etc in 38C...simply didn't give us the energy to be excited to visit anything. Any step outside the shade was painful.  So most visiting had been reduced : first we 'cooled' down a bit in the airco-cooled hotel room, and then we walked in the city centre just enough to get an impression, find a terrace for a drink and then search for a restaurant for dinner.  While in theory we should have had many hours for visiting, it feels we've done just a minimum walk each time. Cities like Vichy that I did not know yet before, are still greatly unknown. 

So in the end the feeling of driving and driving fatigue for me personally was a lot stronger than intended and the joy of having visited and discovered new parts of France was a lot less.  But in all in all, we did have the luxury of having time and that makes a big difference too. 

As for the roads: 

North of France is always busy so it seems (both in east or west of the country), the middle of France is more relax and has more space and the south of France is very busy again.  Roadworks however passed rather smooth. 
Several days we went off the highways and wanted to explore on departmental roads. For the destinations in the Ardèche there was no alternative anyhow.  Beforehand I had thought departmental roads would be slow and lining up from massive roundabout to roundabout. In reality, I found them much more quiet than I expected (probably depending on the region we were in) but therefore rather smooth. Obviously, they max at 80 kms an hour and often cross tiny villages that have limited speed levels.   Much to my surprise, even D-roads have stopping zones relatively regularly.  The N-roads however are the worst: they don't progress as a highway but are usually uninteresting and busy and industrial.  

But ...a big but.....the "Autoroute the Soleil" on a weekend in France is as horrendous as anticipated!  In fact it is worse.  We thought we were not driving on black or red weekends. We thought that our timeframe would allow us to avoid the worst times. We thought that by the end of August this would be ok. 

Well: we had to move from the Ardèche to the Côte d'Azur on Saturday: 3h on the highway, which meant 1h30 extra traffic jams to be added.  Returning on the last Saturday of August (!!) was even worse.  We only had to drive 3 hours to our stop that day to have flexibility, but in reality we've driven 6-7h!  Well driven is the wrong word.  Conclusion, it seems that anything between Lyons - Marseille doesn't move.  There are even big traffic jams to get off the highway into a parking lot to my horror.   And if you get off on a tiny parking lot, you are in line for over 30 minutes to access the toilets.  No kidding. 
So our strategy to only do "a small" part of the Autoroute de Soleil on a weekend didn't work.  Conclusion is: you can't plan any km on the highway. Ensure you are at destination beforehand and that you stay longer (in a hotel at your location) until you can rent your vacation house or camping or ... Only move on week days.  Those are bad enough.  

The parking lots

I found the parking lots along the toll highways were all frequent and clean, with clean toilets (unlike my childhood memories and the reputation of French toilets).  
Along other roads there are also ever 20-40km pull-outs / picknick places.  However, it's hard to predict where they are. 

Final conclusion

Our idea to roadtrip was a good one but I should be realistic with my expectations of the amount of things you visit while on the road.  I might design longer stretches (and balance with more local time at one spot) or deliberately plan stretches along departmental roads (especially in the South of France). and NO driving time whatsover on the Autoroute the soleil in any weekend.