Bloody traffic

Saturday 04 August 2007 Bloody traffic After a very pleasant night in the Novatel we woke at around nine had a leisurely breakfast and checked out by 11:00. I say pleasant but this wasn’t quite the case for Hazel, the waitress opening the evening’s bottle of red managed to spatter her white top – we managed to negotiate a free bottle so it wasn’t all bad. The plan was to arrive at Canet shortly after 3pm. We drove through Lyon alongside the Rhone and all appeared to be going well until the traffic slowed into our first traffic jam of the day. We hoped that soon we would see the reason for the delay but this wasn’t to be the case. Sadly the problem was sheer volume of traffic and any minor incident would cause a massive delay. The first hundred miles took us four hours. The next two hundred were not much better!! Shortly after the Montpelier toll we noticed smoke in the distance, a helicopter hovering and no traffic in the opposite direction. As we got closer it was obvious that areas of forest were on fire, fortunately for us our section of road was still open. Not so fortunate for those heading in the other direction, for them the road was closed with no escape the tailback stretching for probably 10 miles. We finally arrived at 21:00 to find the onsite shop closed – a quick dash to Carreforr solved the immediate wine and beer problem and the kids went and got us takeaway pizza.