Heavy traffic

Little blue flowers on stalks near Saint-Aignan
All pictures taken on 02 August 2008

And a close-up

Yesterday was the biggest drive day of the summer season in France. It was the day of the great mid-summer chassé-croisé on the highways. There's no good translation in English for that expression.

Chassé-croisé on a thistle
Click the pictures to enlarge them.

The image in this particular chassé-croisé is of cars chasing each other south and crossing paths with all the cars chasing each other north — in other words, heavy traffic in both directions. All the people who took their vacations down south in July, the juillétistes, were on their way back to their homes in the north. And all those who take vacations in August, the aoûtiens, had packed up their cars and hit the roads, headed south.

It was a surprise to see a field of poppies so late in summer.
This is at Les Laurendières, just down the hill
from La Renaudière where we live.

The result was something like 700 km or 400 miles of traffic jams on the roads, at one point. As always, the worst bottleneck in the country was the autoroute in the Rhône Valley where it passes through Lyon and continues south into Provence. For people headed to prime vacation destinations like the Drôme, the Luberon, the Gorges de l'Archèche, the Côte d'Azur, and the Camargue, it was very slow going.

Bales of hay in August are not a surprise.

The going was also slow on the autoroute that runs south out of the Paris area to Orléans, Tours, Poitiers, and Bordeaux. The back-up just north of Orléans was many miles long, according to radio reports. Drivers were advised to head west to Le Mans instead of going south toward Orléans, and then to turn south toward Tours from there. But that route got clogged too.

Yellowish-white flowers on vines.

The best advice the autoroute officials gave was for people to stay off the roads altogether. Few listened, but we did. We didn't start the car yesterday. We each had a good walk, between rainshowers. On est passés entre les gouttes, as they say. Callie too. We were none the worse for wear.