For a day and a half, we spent a lot of time on the road. We had to take our friend to Geneva for her conference. Getting out of Lyon was a bit of a trick that involved lots of out of the way roads and a couple of U-turns in the middle of roads that don't really allow for them but we found our way. The drive was nice even though it was pricey but the views paid for themselves. Some of the tunnels and bridges on the highway were high up and provided some really nice views of the mountains and valleys around. At the Swiss border, we encountered a nasty little surprise. The Swiss find it perfectly legitimate to charge anyone coming into the country by car a 40 euro fee to use their highways. The thief, or guy, taking money reassured us that the fee was only once a year and the sticker he gave us valid for that time period. That's wonderful, because we only wanted to visit Geneva for 30 minutes to drop our friend off then head back to France. Is there a temporary waiver for this fee? Not at all, good day. We said good bye to our friend Mollie and headed back to Lyon so we could start our painful trek across the country on the back roads to Bordeaux.
The direction site we'd been using was a tad ambiguous with their directions shall we say. We started off going the wrong way, turned around onto a congested highway, found the right way, got off at the right exit, and then basically got lost for three hours until we finally figured our way out. Every time we thought we were going in the right direction, we would see a sign directing us back to the middle of Lyon, leading us to believe that Lyon wanted to let you in but not out. We finally pulled out the maps our friend's mom had given us and found our way after the three hours of delay. The drive was awesome and the French countryside beautiful.
We saw a few towns decorated for some special holiday and that evening, we saw fireworks outside of the town we slept in. And by slept in, I mean we slept in the car at an overnight truck stop place and it was not comfortable at all. The drive took us about nine hours but we had a great time and got to see lots of beautiful chateaus and other medieval sites scattered around the country.
The route national is the best way to see France, not to mention the most economical. We used the site mappy to get directions around France. It's a great site because it tells you how much the tolls are. And in France, they love tolls! We would have added 400 Euros to our trip by taking the highways. If you plan on taking road trips across Europe, be sure to consult mappy to find out the toll situation. It can be eye opening.
On the back roads of France, Châteaus abound! We weren't able to stop for all of them but the ones we did stop for were spectacular. Some you can visit and some you can't. Just stop and ask.
We pulled over in one small town to watch the Spanish team win their quarterfinal match. I wasn't a popular man wearing my Spain jersey. I just smiled at them. ¡Toma franceses!
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