DIRAC DUO TOUR 99  

Tour de France

When going from Italy to Spain by car you have to go through France. When passing the Italy/France border at 8 am, member Dirac Löfström made a phone call to his good friend Fred who lives in Barcelona to ask if we could come and visit for a few days. The answer was "Yes, of course" and The Duo was very happy. Knowing this we saw no reason to bother with France and the pedal was spiked to the metal to get to Barcelona as soon as possible. Unfortunately an exit on the highway was missed (we did not see it) and we found ourselves going north into the heart of France.

Lost in France

We where a 60-70 km off course, now we only had to get to the other side of the highway to drive back and we would only be a couple of hours behind schedule (if there had been a schedule that is). We got off the highway...

...and tried to get onto it again in the other direction. But a mismatch between the colours of the road signs in Italy (which we were used to) and France had us to get to see France. In Italy the city name is on a green sign if it refers to the Autostrada, and a blue if it is a 'normal' (without pay tolls). In France it is the opposit..
So after a while we realised that we were not on our way back onto the highway, but going towards Montpellier 'the hard way'. We got to see alot of the countryside...

...and villages on our way...

...but one thing amazed us the most. This second biggest road to Montpellier was at one point (at least) going through a village where it was so narrow that there could not be traffic in both directions at the same time!
A fast calculation gave that it is cheaper to go the pay toll way since it takes twice the time to go the other way, and the car therefore consumes (at least) twice the gas.
We took a lot of pictures of the countryside.

The temperature outside and especially inside the car was very high that day. Below is a picture taken inside the car where you can see that the temperature is about 46 degrees...

And the last pictures of this detour...

© DiracDuo
Last updated: juli 05, 1999.