It was another driving day today. Sort of a rest day, and hopefully not too stressful.
We checked out of Laurent & Didier’s place at Aix-en-Provence, and checked in to Farzad’s place in Nice.
But a lot happened between those two events.
We let Didier know last night that we would be departing at around 9.00am this morning, and he responded (via the AirBNB app) that he would be there to say goodbye. Personally I like the social interaction with our hosts, although we have had very little of it for this trip so far.
We have interacted with Didier on a couple of occassions now … when we arrived Didier welcomed us holding his 10 month old son (Milo – pronunced “Mee-lo”- I think he said), and we saw Laurent playing on the trampoline with (what I assume was) his son, who must have been about 7 or 8.
From what I can gather, Laurent and Didier are married and there are a couple of kids, but I’m not entirely sure who belongs to who. Experience has taught me not to ask a question if you don’t really need to know the answer.
Other than a couple of sightings, we have not had anything to do with Laurent. Maybe he is shy.
So just before 9.00am, I opened the front door and started taking suitcases out to Claude. Laurent was putting his son into the car, so I gave him a cheery “Bonjour”. I turned away for a moment, and by the time I’d turned back to introduce myself, Laurent was in his car and driving away.
Maybe he is very shy. Or he was late for work.
So I made a few trips in and out to get all of our stuff loaded, and started the engine, but there was no sign of Didier.
We made a show of turning Claude around in the driveway to make it clear that we were leaving, but he was still a no-show. So we dropped the keys into the letterbox, sent him a quick goodbye on the AirBNB app, and took off.
It was a cool start to the day – 7 degrees that felt like 5, so we kept our jackets handy in the car.
Aix-en-Provence to Nice is about 2 and a half hours on the toll road, and we had previously told Farzad (tonight’s host) that we wouldn’t be in Nice until about 3.00pm, so the maths didn’t work.
We decided to take the scenic route … the one without tolls. That one is about 4 hours and if we add in a stop for lunch, it might just work out. It might be a long stop for lunch, but it will be a nice, relaxing drive in the country.
Hopefully. What could possibly go wrong?
We gave Joséphine her instructions and headed off. I was particularly anxious to avoid the centre of Aix generally, and the bus lanes specifically, so we made sure that Joséphine understood that expectation.
An expression that springs to my mind when driving in France, is that “He who hesitates is lost”. Or perhaps the more relevant expression is that “he who hesitates, disintegrates”.
I have found that driving in France requires you to behave just like everyone else, which is somewhere between decisive and aggressive .. but it’s a fine line.
If you see a gap in the traffic, you just take it. If you need to change lanes, just do it and someone will get out of the way. They seem to be very efficient at just moving across to another lane if you move into their spot.
In fact I’ll go even further and say that the French not only accept that style of driving … they EXPECT it. They expect you not to hesitate.
The early part of the route took us along some of the same roads that we take when we have been to the park and ride facility, so we recognised some of those streets. But before we had gone 5km, we had already taken our first wrong turn.
Joséphine’s instructions were unclear. She said that we needed to be in the left lane ready to turn left, but I must have misjudged how far it was until the turn, and so I found myself turning onto the A8 motorway.
Not the end of the world – Joséphine will work it out.
But it turned out that Joséphine wasn’t entirely unhappy with this mistake, as she just took us a slightly different way that got us heading in more-or-less the right direction, with roughly the same ETA.
Remember the other day after our Aix-en-Provence walking tour and we just wanted to do a nice drive in the country – on the Route Cézanne towards Le Tholonet – and we simply couldn’t find it? Well as luck would have it, this morning’s wrong turn took us directly into Le Tholonet.
And while I hate to sound like I’m complaining, Le Tholonet wasn’t that exciting or scenic, and I don’t think we missed much.
It felt like we travelled on all sorts of roads today: pretty ones, rural ones, places that felt like driving in Australia, busy roads, coastal roads, scenic roads, and through some bigger townships.
Because we were on the minor roads – the “N” roads and the “D” roads – there was the usual speeding up, slowing down, taking the 2nd exit from a roundabout, etc.
And before you knew it, we were out in the country again with rolling hills and grapevines as far as the eye could see. Some of the roads gave Claude a chance to give his horses a gallop, with several roads at 80km/h or 90km/h.
For quite some time on one of those roads I was stuck behind someone who – like me – was trying to stay on the speed limit.
My observation of France is that they have lots of speed cameras, but they warn you when one is coming up. So you see a sign that shows a car and something resembling radio waves engulfing it, and that seems to indicate that there may be a speed camera soon, although – like at home – that particular camera might not actually be in use at the moment.
There does not appear to be any mobile speed cameras, or hidden police cars. The police seem to be very transparent about when and where you are liable for a speeding ticket.
But despite the fact that in some places there are no speed cameras and everybody speeds, I still try to stick to the speed limit because I just don’t know what I don’t know.
So we were puddling along at about 78km/h in an 80km/h zone behind someone going at a speed that I was comfortable with, and there was a line of cars behind us. If I am holding up traffic, I try to pull over and let them all past, but the guy in front of me clearly hadn’t had that same thought.
Then suddenly the car immediately behind me – a black taxi – started flashing his lights and honking his horn at me, like the whole thing was my fault.
I can only assume that he felt I wasn’t being agressive enough because I hadn’t overtaken the slow dude, so he gave me a practical demonstration of how it is done. He pulled out into the path of oncoming traffic, and went screaming past us both.
Interesting. Not very safe, but interesting.
We had a notion that we would stop somewhere nice for lunch. We are skirting along the coast road down in the Côte d’Azur, and it seemed a bit silly not to stop at a seaside township for lunch.
Saint-Tropez was the place where we really wanted to stop, but all indications are that traffic there is pretty manic, and I didn’t need that additional stress. Neither did MBW as it turned out.
So MBW did some quick Googling and ChatGPTing, and Agay was suggested as a quiet, pretty little seaside township without the stress. And so Joséphine was given new instructions – take us to Nice via Agay.
We had left Aix-en-Provence around 9.00am and it was now close to 10.30am. We were puddling along quite happily, and I was practicing (in my head) all of the french words that I know: Bonjour, Au revoir, boulangerie, patisserie, croissant, baguette …
Me: “Do you think that we should look for a boulangarie nearby and stop for coffee and something to eat?”
So Joséphine got more new instructions. Find us a boulangerie.
And so it came to be that we found ourselves in the sleepy little hamlet of Besse-sur-Issole. A pretty little provincial village with medieval buildings, narrow streets, and people carrying baguettes.
My happy place 😀
It wasn’t entirely clear where we were supposed to go in Besse-sur-Issole, because the signage was confusing and Joséphine had been stood down for a while. So, without hesitation, we made our own decisions.
As it turns out, the first decision we made was a poor tactical decision. I completely misread the “no entry” sign, and found myself eyeball to eyeball with another driver who clearly understood the road rules and signs better than I did. And as luck would have it, the road was so narrow that there was absolutely no opportunity to pass each other, and one of us had to reverse.
That would be me 🙁
But on the bright side, in Besse-sur-Issole there is no flaring of nostrils, grinding of teeth, or honking of horns when a stupid Australian makes a tactical error.
We found the local public carpark, put on our jackets, and went off walking in search of the boulangerie. We turned onto a side street that led to the village square, and guess what we found?
Markets!
I don’t know how she does it …
A very quaint little town square with about a dozen local vendors selling all types of stuff, from bits of material and buttons, to a guy rotisserie-ing chickens and roasting potatoes.
We found the boulangerie and we bought some pastries for smoko, and a baguette for later (lunch).
One of the funny things here in France – particularly the rural areas – is that cafe owners don’t mind if you sit at one of their tables and eat stuff you’ve bought elsewhere, so long as you buy a drink from them.
Sitting outside at a cafe, drinking coffee and watching the world go by is one of those things that we love about France, but haven’t really had the chance to do because everyone here smokes at the outside tables.
But nobody was smoking, so we went in.
The young guy (30’s?) waiting tables said something in French which we didn’t understand, and I responded with my usual “Je ne parlez pas français”.
He responded with “That’s OK, I speak English. Where are you from?”
And so began a fascinating conversation with a guy who was born in Strasbourg (we are going there), spent some time in Nice (we are here tonight), and had spent 6 months in Sydney with his girlfriend, saving money to buy a car so that he could do a lap of Australia.
Unfortunately COVID put the kibosh on those plans and he returned to France, got married, and bought a restaurant in Besse-sur-Issole.
We ordered 2 coffees, ate our pastries, and watched the world go by. And he only charged us €5.00 for the two coffees.
Back in Claude, we continued towards Agay for lunch. We had made another tactical error by not using toilet facilities before departing Besse-sur-Issole, and we figured that we should find one before lunch.
I’ve mentioned before that there are normally toilets on the toll roads, but they are difficult to find in the villages. As luck would have it, we found one at the end (or start, depending on your perspective) of a toll road, so we stopped.
Public toilets are always a bit of a gamble, but these ones were OK. Not the best public toilets I’ve ever used, but not the worst either.
We passed through lots of little townships, many with that same commercial busy-ness feeling to them.
You will recall that we have been trying to stick with the “N” (National) roads because they are better, but we went through a small township called Le Muy where the “N” road was only one car width wide, and one-way.
Some of the places that we drove through felt like driving through Moorooka or Coorparoo, with car yards, McDonald’s, KFC, etc.
We saw a sign for a McDonald’s calling themselves “Les Arcs” (as in the “Golden Arches”) – which we thought was funny – only to discover that it was actually a McDonald’s in the township of Les Arcs.
Not as funny as we’d thought.
We made it to Agay at a bit after 1.00pm for a lunch of salami and cheese on a fresh baguette, sitting there in our warm jackets while watching kids running barefoot on the sand on one side of us, and a lady stripped down to her underwear and sunbaking on the beach on the other side.
The beaches were sandy, but nowhere nearly as nice as Queensland beaches.
After lunch, we loaded Claude up again and headed off on the last run to Nice, taking the coast road. The water was a beautiful blue and the coastline was amazing.
It felt just like driving the Big Sur in California – something that we did pre-COVID.
It wasn’t a fast trip, but it was a spectacular one.
The next big place that we went through was Cannes (as in “The Cannes Film Festival”) and we stopped amongst the Mercedes and Jaguars and took photos of the water.
Coming out of Cannes on the home run to Nice was a nightmare due to all of the roadworks.
I don’t know if there is a Guinness World Records category for the most wrong turns in one journey, but there should be. And I’m claiming it.
Joséphine was confused and uncertain with all of the roadworks. MBW and I sometimnes couldn’t agree on which was the 4th or 5th exit, and Joséphine fluffing around didn’t help any.
MBW found a better way to get to Nice by taking a toll road, but she swapped our phones over (for the navigation) at a crucial point entering a roundabout, and we took another wrong exit.
And then we found ourselves on a motorway. Which was OK, except …
Normally when you get on a motorway, you take a ticket when entering, and then pay the toll when leaving. But sometimes you find yourself at a toll booth at the entry to a motorway without a ticket.
And without a clue either, as it happens.
But this was a special one where you pay your toll at the start of the toll road.
So we paid, and continued on to Nice.
Nice is nice, but very busy. We knew that our apartment overlooks the water, so it will be close to the beach, but the traffic around that area was diabolical. We couldn’t find anywhere to park while we located Farzad (our host for tonight), so I dropped MBW off to look for him while I did loops.
I nearly had a low-speed head-on collision with another vehicle while turning. (MBW doesn’t know that BTW, so it will be news for her when she reads this).
But all worked out. MBW found Farzad, I successfuly navigated to the apartment’s carpark without scratching Claude, and we got into our apartment.
We ducked out to get some groceries so that we don’t starve, and we have now had dinner and coffee, and settling in for the evening.
Did I mention that our apartment overlooks the water?
I might never come home. Farzad is going to have to get me out of here with a crowbar.
Ciao
#Europe2025