Free Motorway South To The Med – Vias Plage

Zagan the motorhome has beach and the Mediterranean Sea filling his windows. We’ve reached the coast and pulled on the hand brake for three nights at Farret Beach camping in Vias Plage (N43.29014, E3.42351). This place is a campsite in the summer charging up to €65 a night in August, but in winter it’s an aire because the reception, loos etc are closed. But that means it’s just €11 for a perfect sea-front pitch, including electricity.

Leaving Saint Pourcain sur Sioule we made our way south and picked up the A75 motorway near Riom. We’ve been using a route suggested on the About France website, which we’ve used several times to find toll free routes across France. The site offers a choice of minimal toll routes too, and suggested that a short section of toll motorway near Riom was worth paying for, so we hopped on it. Not being used to toll roads, we were taken aback at just how many toll booths there were, and as we approached and stopped in the middle of the motorway, just how many had a height barrier!

Feeling like right muppets, we crept across a steady stream of cars. earning ourselves a few disgruntled horn honks, until we reached the booths without a height restriction. We then drove into one of the ones with a 30 speed limit sign above it – bad move. It turns out these are for traffic to flow through, so there was no one in the booth. Hazard lights on, thoroughly confused, we spotted a pay machine by the barrier, but it wouldn’t take our ticket and no one answered the help buzzer. After what felt like an age, a lady from one of the other toll booths came over to us, sorted out payment and explained we need to go into the lanes with a green arrow in the future – like that’s going to happen! We’ll be steering well clear of toll roads!

We were now on the free section of the A75 which runs for around 300km south to the Med. It made for lovely easy driving, I would guess – Jay did all the driving and we were soon at the Garabit Viaduct. The sun was shining, so we pulled into the motorway services/viewpoint and hopped out of Zagan to gaze over what was the largest and highest railway arch bridge in the world when it was finished in 1884. The small information centre was closed, but we could see some of the display through the window. The bridge was designed and built by one of France’s most famous engineers, Gustave Eiffel – yes, the one with the tower in Paris. His design didn’t use trusses or solid beams, so it could cope with the high winds experienced in the Garabit valley, and once complete it opened up vital rail routes to the south of France.

Regular readers of this blog will know that we aren’t ones to travel far in a day, and so we decided to break up the 300km run to the coast with a stop in La Canourgue (N44.43288,E3.21189). Pulling into the aire, we had the place to ourselves and after a spot of lunch we went for a wander around the town. The sun was shining and we found a laundry just a couple of hundred metres from the aire and so we decided to stay for a couple of days.

The pretty old town has canals flowing underneath it,and in the fifteenth century there were around 25 mills on a 3km stretch of water. Walking around the town today, we could still see the marks on the red sandstone door surrounds where tools used to clean the granite grindstones of the mill were sharpened.

Later on, fancying a bit of TV, we taped our dustpan brush to a stick and poked it out of the skylight to free the stuck part on our satellite dish. A check on our Satfinder app to make sure the statue of Mary on the hill wasn’t in the way, plus a fresh battery in the satellite finder had our TV working again. We don’t watch it much, but when something big is happening back home we like to tune in. We spent the evening watching the Brexit vote, flicking between the BBC Parliament channel, Euronews and CNN to get a view from outside of the UK.

Of course what we hadn’t realised was that we were still quite high up, so as night fell so did the temperature outside. We cranked up the heating and woke to find frost on our silver screens. It had got down to -5.5°C in the night, and was still hovering around -4 when we both set off for a morning run. Jay took to the hills while I went for my first run since we both caught the Christmas lurgy. I took it steady and had to cover my face so I could breath the cold air, but after just 3km I was shattered. A hot shower defrosted me and once I had got all the laundry done, an afternoon nap was much needed.

After a slightly warmer night of just above freezing, we set off in cloud along the free motorway. We knew our destination for the next few days was a bit in the middle of nowhere (here), so instead of paying to cross the Millau Viaduct, we dropped off the motorway and down into the town. Millau’s quite a large town with lots of supermarkets, so we could easily fill up on LPG and food before climbing back out the other side of the city, hardly able to see the viaduct in the low clouds.

As we left the motorway at Beziers and headed for the coast, we passed a set of motorway toll booths fenced off and burnt out. I hope it was the gilets jaunes protests rather than confused motorhomers. Driving through the small seaside town of Vias Plage everything was shut up for the winter, including the numerous campsites covering every square inch of the place – it must get heaving in the summer. Arriving at Farret Beach (or ferret beach as we like to call it) there was only one other motorhome. It was parked up with a car and very settled into the first pitch by the gate but no sign of any warden. We tried calling the phone number on the closed reception door, but no answer. Then we worked out that was for weekends only, and we had to check in at a larger campsite back up the road. Abandoning Zagan in the entrance we wandered back, checked in for three nights and then picked our pitch.

About an hour later another UK-registered motorhome arrived. Fellow motorhomers and runners Mike and Mandy from MotleysMagicalMysteryTour popped by to say hello. As you might guess, we hit it off instantly and had loads in common and got lots of puppy love from their two Cockerpoos Poppy and Stanley. So the next couple of days were spend walking along the beach, going for a run and best of all chatting and relaxing with those guys.

Mandy cooked us a fabulous Indian feast on Friday night. Our bellies were still full when we said a sad farewell on Saturday morning, but we are heading in the same direction, so hopefully we’ll meet up again soon. Once the sun had risen enough to put some heat in the air we got the bikes off the rack and headed for the city of Agde. We managed to find lots of paths and cycle paths, so we didn’t have to ride on roads too much, which was a good job as I’m still trying to work out what gear I should be in.

After cycling around the city, it thankfully has quite a few cycle paths, everywhere looked shut, so we parked up our bikes and went for a wander. Convinced we had missed the town centre, it is after all Saturday morning so should be packed, we soon discovered that we were in ‘Centre Ville’. Nearly everything was closed, and looking like it had been closed for quite some time. Many of the shops were ‘to let’ and large parts of the roads around the fortress-looking cathedral were dug up. We can only assume that everyone was out an out of town shopping centre somewhere and poor Agde was looking very sorry for itself!

Back at Zagan the sun is still shining and it’s time to get the maps out once more. Our batteries are fully juiced up and our little holiday-in-a-holiday will soon come to an end. Tomorrow we hit the road again – but we don’t know where to yet! That’s the beauty of motorhoming.

Ju x