The Month of Eight Countries: France

This is the seventh and final story in a mini-series called The Month of Eight Countries, which is about the countries Bruno and I are visiting this month as part of our 4,000km overland transit between Turkey and France. The previous instalments of the series were on Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia, Italy, and Switzerland.

We were about to cross into France, Bruno’s home country and the final country on our overland road trip. We were about to reach the home of Bruno’s brother and family. We were approaching home.

Yet all I could feel was anxiety.

Our vehicle’s out-of-date registration papers made driving in France illegal. In previous months, when Bruno and I had been planning our route, we’d contemplated skipping out on France entirely. We’d thought about leaving our vehicle in Switzerland and taking the train to Southern France. We’d contemplated taking a ferry from Italy to Spain and “sneaking in the back door,” (Bruno’s hometown of Agde is close to the Spanish border). Yet here we were entering France over six-hundred kilometers away from our final destination. Would we get make it through the border? Would our papers be examined? Would we lose our beloved vehicle?

I needn’t have worried, at least about the border crossing. The GPS took us the back way into Divonne-les-Bains and we were suddenly in France without so much as a welcome sign. I hadn’t been looking for border hassle, but our arrival in the final country of our month-long, eight-country transit could have been slightly less unceremonious.

It didn’t take long to realize our road trip was coming to an end. We arrived at the home of Bruno’s brother and were welcomed by his sister-in-law and nieces. We’d spent the past month in foreign countries, campsites and parking lots, and here we finally were in familiar territory, with family. I’ve got to say, it felt good.

We spent the weekend with Patrice, Micheline, Romane, Lucile, and Niko. We attended Romane’s end-of-the-year dance performance, and finished off my birthday with a lemon-meringue pie and a champagne toast. We played in the pool, sat in the hot tub, and enjoyed apéros in the garden. Yep, it was good to be with family.

We still had several hundred kilometers to drive between Divonne-les-Bains and the south of France, the official end of our road trip. Part of me would have loved to slowly explore the country along the way – the map illustrated that there was much to see and do – but something in our brains had changed. Seeing part of our family made us want to see the rest as soon as possible.

The driving-in-an-illegal-car fact probably pushed us on a bit faster than usual, too. All we wanted was to park Totoyaya at Bruno’s beach home and be done with it. And so we drove past the medieval villages, the vineyards, the caves à vin, the rivers, and the old town centers without so much as a pit-stop. I’ll have to save my blog entries on the countryside of France for a future trip.

As we approached Montpellier and the final stretch, I felt the excitement of familiarity. We were coming home. I hadn’t expected to feel that sense of homecoming in France – it’s more Bruno’s home than mine, after all – but I guess when you live a life on the road, the roots of home grow quickly.

The next few days were a whirlwind. Catching up with Bruno’s parents, visiting his brother, sister-in-law, and nephews, checking up on our home on the beach, organizing things for Bruno’s impending knee surgery… We dined again at La Table d’Emilie, swam in various swimming pools, and took advantage of the view of the Mediterranean Sea from Bruno’s house.

Yep, the road trip was done. Another chapter in our trip around-the-world was ended. It had been quite the trip. We had never traveled so quickly before, nor crossed so many borders. From Turkey to France, we had driven 3,300km in 30 days. This is an average of 110km a day, which might not seem like much, but it’s double or triple what we usually drive.

Plus, we’d made the effort to avoid highways, which are dull and expensive. We’d always chosen narrow national roads that wound around hills and cut through villages. (The only exceptions to the no-highway rule were an accidental 20km chunk in Serbia, a 3km stretch in Italy in order to reach a rest stop for the night, and the final tract of road between Montpellier and Agde, where our excitement to get home overweighed our desire to drive the road-less-traveled). This had meant that our average speed was more like 35kmph, rather than 70kmph. If we couldn’t travel slowly, at least we could drive slowly!

Admittedly, we’d felt the fatigue. The fatigue of long and frequent days on the road, a border crossing every 4 days, and jam-packed tourist visits along the way. In the entire month, we only allowed ourselves 3 days off.   Only one out of every ten days did we neither drive nor visit sights, and instead allow ourselves to catch up on laundry, cleaning, internet and relaxation. That’s at least three times less days off than we usually give ourselves.

We arrived into the stifling summer heat of Southern France utterly spent, but with hearts and minds overflowing with experiences.

And with that arrival, we celebrated an even more special moment than the completion of our month-long road trip: the true looping of Bruno’s around-the-world trip. In 1998, Bruno left St-Thibéry, France, in his Toyota truck, and seventeen years later, after circumnavigating the globe, visiting five continents, and logging over 500,000km, he parked his vehicle in the same spot from which he’d originally departed one long-ago snowy November day. In 1998, Bruno left France with a vague plan of overland travel in Africa; in 2015, he returned with a much-transformed vehicle, a wife collected on the road, and more memories and experiences than a middle-age man should ever have. More than that, he returned to France with the knowledge that the traveling life was the life for him, and the the know-how and the confidence to do it all again.

Yep, after a few months of rest and relaxation, we’ll be ready to hit the road again for a second around-the-world trip! Stay tuned for many more adventures as we bring ourselves and our faithful home-on-wheels around the globe yet again!