Drive south to experience France's idiosyncratic glory
By Mick Webb
Published: 14 January 2006
For those of us addicted to summer holidays in France's warmer southern parts, the drive down towards le soleil ranks somewhere between a necessary evil and a nightmare from a film by Jean-Luc Godard. The standard approach is to get it over and done with as quickly as possible: start as early as you can from home, get a morning crossing, then do as much as you can on the autoroute. If you do need to stop for the night, cram into a room at a Formule 1 or one of the other low-cost chain hotels where you know what you're going to get and won't have to pay too much for it.
Alternatively, you can adopt the philosophy that to travel is as much fun as to arrive, add an extra couple of days, put some more euros into the budget and really enjoy the off-motorway scenery, not to mention the eccentric small hotels that abound in the French hinterland.
By way of example, our family holiday last year was in a rented house in the department of Corrèze, between Clermont Ferrand and Limoges. From Calais - the leading arrival point for British drivers - I had planned a couple of overnight stops.
The first of these was at a hotel south-east of Paris in the cheese country of Brie. After an undemanding three-hour drive from Calais we were greeted by the sight of a dilapidated gothic-looking building in a large and unkempt park. Well, what do you expect for two stars, I thought, as I went to check-in? What I hadn't anticipated was being handed a couple of keys and directed towards a row of Nissen huts a few hundred metres away, beside a crumbling boundary wall.
Fortunately, they turned out to be more comfortable inside than their appearance suggested, and as there is nothing my partner likes more than a sundowner, the day was brought to a successful conclusion by an apéritif and a meal on the terrace of the main house, while a huge sun sank behind a grove of stately and venerable trees.
The next day's surprise was of a different order as we went cross-country to join the A71 motorway at Bourges, before leaving it again just north of Clermont Ferrand en route for a hotel by the Gorges de la Sioule.
A dip in the fast-flowing river Sioule set us up nicely for the evening meal but not for the shock of the wine list. It was as thick as a telephone directory, and the prices were not far off telephone numbers. However old the Burgundy, €65,000 (£38,000) did seem a bit on the steep side for a bottle. We settled eventually on the house rosé for a more modest €12 (£8.50).
I discovered next morning that we had stumbled on a hotel with a nationally renowned wine-cellar and although the owner offered to knock a nought off one of his more expensive vintages if I fancied the investment, I declined the kind offer.
The major hurdle to be overcome on any journey south is of course Paris. If you feel a touch of the boy-racers coming on, the N104, aka La Francilienne is an entertaining/terrifying route along the eastern edge of the city, with many of the attributes of a ride at nearby Disneyland Paris. Motorway speeds are combined with wickedly tight curves, access and exit roads that appear randomly from left and right, while at times the N104 is entirely swallowed up by another road before re-appearing suddenly as an inadequately signed turning.
Alternatively - and less scarily - there are routes that give the capital a wide berth to the east of Paris, via Reims, or quite a long way to the west, across the flat, wheat plain of La Beauce (France's breadbasket). Here, the monotony can be countered by counting windmills or spotting the imposing spires of Chartres cathedral.
Once you're south of Paris, though, a whole range of green and pleasant stop-offs opens up. The forest of Fontainebleau, for instance, or marshy La Sologne with its worryingly neat villages. Further south still are the regional parks of la Brenne or Le Morvan and the little-known but delightful oak forest of Tronçais, south of Bourges, in the very centre of France.
In the days before children, and before the internet took the strain out of booking in advance, it was worth turning up on spec at a country hotel and trusting to luck there would be room at the inn. What's more, this serendipitous approach seemed to increase the likelihood of an interesting experience. I once stopped for the night at a hotel in a village near Beauvais in northern France, just because of the name: Les Deux Marroniers, the two chestnut trees. We were the only guests.
"You're in luck," the owner told us. "It's our local fête." Leaving the bar to fend for itself, he guided us by torchlight through the pitch-black night down to the nearby lake, where a parade of fishing boats, lit by Chinese lanterns, drifted soundlessly past like colourful ghosts. It was a magical and rather un-European event, which ended with a firework display that must have bankrupted the local council.
On another occasion, our route south took us through the central region of la Touraine where our plan to camp for the night was disrupted by a vicious August thunderstorm. The town of Montoire-sur-Loir seemed closed for the holidays, as did the unpretentious Hôtel des Voyageurs. The owners were hosting a family wedding. Astonishingly, they took pity on us and not only took us in but provided a meal worthy of a Michelin-starred establishment. I can still taste the glazed, roasted guinea fowl with its neatly wrapped bunch of baby leeks.
To help digestion, we had a post-meal stroll-cum-stagger from the hotel to the nearby and equally unremarkable-looking railway station, which turned out to have an odd claim to fame. Nowadays the station is only used on Sunday mornings for tourist excursions, but in October 1940 it was the scene of a crucial historical encounter, as a train bearing Marshal Pétain had a rendezvous with another (heavily armoured) one carrying Adolf Hitler. With their subsequent handshake the Nazi-supporting Vichy republic came into being.
I will admit that the happy-go-lucky approach to holidaying does not make everyone happy and favouring byways over highways does not guarantee family popularity. An all-time low was achieved by my plan to travel from Dieppe to the Languedoc on the French equivalent of B roads - the ones that are yellow or even white on the Michelin maps.
True to their Roman origins these are often wonderfully straight, but unfortunately, they are populated in late July and August by vast combine harvesters, which you can pass only by reversing roles and taking to the fields yourself. Also, as these minor roads approach rivers like the Loire or the Seine, they have a habit of terminating with a bac - or ferry - with a predictable delay to progress, particularly around lunch-time.
What with one thing and another, our first day's kilometrage would have been bettered by a half-decent cyclist, so I was persuaded back onto the autoroutes for the rest of the journey. I should say though that the ever-expanding network of French motorways allows you to mix and match the speedy with the sedate, and to arrive somewhere pleasant in time to enjoy it.
Where accommodation is concerned, the welcome and the comfort of country auberges are naturally more unpredictable than in the chain hotels. However, nowadays there are many fewer examples of bedrooms with large-patterned wallpaper in shades of brown, and beds whose mattresses sag to the floor with you enveloped in them like a baguette-filling.
The food can be a problem, though. Last year we broke our homeward journey from the Corrèze with a detour off the A20 to visit the regional park of La Brenne. After a relaxing hour watching a colony of rare whiskered terns performing aerobatics as they fished for their supper we went back to the hotel for our own meal and encountered the bad end of posh French nosh. Our boys, 17 and 12, were not particularly interested in the menu d'enfants with the hamburger and chips (again) so they joined us for the menu du terroir: a very muddy local eel in jelly, followed by lamb in a bizarre sauce of honey and a cherry liqueur. A small table awash with delicate, expensive glasses added to the stress, which was not alleviated by an argument over the order. We won't be returning and nor would they want to see us again, I reckon. But I never go back to any of these places, however nice they are, simply because there are so many others to try.
Yet the whole process - even the misunderstandings and the hassles with eurocheques or the phone calls to hotels that have been closed for five years because you're using a guide-book that's out-of-date - are all part of the fun. Despite ever closer European unity, France is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
by Independent.co.uk
