La route est longue

Yesterday, I plugged the SD card that all my 2019 Auvergne photos are saved on into the USB slot on the big TV upstairs and looked at all the photos as a slideshow. That took a couple of hours and it gave me an overview of what I have to work with. Because their is no waste or cost to taking digital photos, I usually take duplicates or triplicates of each photo, hoping that I'll get one that stands out from the others in quality. And I take a lot of photos that have little chance of turning out, because, well, it's always worth a try. So I have a lot of sorting, organizing, and photo editing to do.

Here we are again, riding down the autoroute toward Clermont-Ferrand. It rained for much of the trip last Monday, on and off, and the wind was howling. That slowed us down. The speed limit on the autoroute is 130 kph when the weather is good, but it's prudent to go slower in bad weather. Walt had set the Citroën's cruise control (le régulateur de vitesse) to 120 kph, which is about 72 mph. That seemed fast enough. A lot of cars were going faster, probably closer to 140 kph.

It's about 300 kilometers (180 miles) from Saint-Aignan to Clermont-Ferrand. After the nerve-racking winds and rains along the way, we were pretty tired by the time we got there. After we paid the toll, we pulled into a rest-stop service area for a little break. Tasha needed a pee and a drink of water, and so did we. The photo above shows the view I saw from the rest area. A little research using Google maps tells me the name of the town is Le Crest. C'est pittoresque, non ?

We were then on a short section of a toll-free autoroute that runs south from Clermont-Ferrand down toward Montpellier and the Mediterranean coast. Finally, there's a turn-off onto small roads that lead past the town of Brioude (more later about that place) toward the préfecture of the Haute-Loire département — the big town called Le Puy-en-Velay — which was our destination. The speed limit on two-lane roads in France now is 80 kph (about 50 mph). It was 90 kph until a few months ago, when it was lowered in an attempt to reduce the number of accidents on such roads.

We drove through a few towns and villages, but the road to Le Puy runs mostly through open countryside. There's no autoroute to Le Puy from any direction — it is remote — though the roads in the Haute-Loire are being widened and improved. Le Puy is about 130 kilometers (80 miles) from Clermont, and Google Maps says it takes at least 1½ hours to drive that. That means you'll average about 70 kph (40 mph) on this stretch of road when there's rain and a lot to truck traffic — even though half the distance is four-laned (but curvy and hilly). We thought we'd never get there.