Travel Advice for July-August: Don't

After decades in France of watching the summer news reports of July-August road congestion, we ignored our own resolutions and hit the road. Early one Saturday morning - 5 AM to "avoid the rush" - we joined the A8 autoroute heading west. Leaving the overly busy Cote d'Azur for the Southwest of France. 5 AM, Saturday, and the autoroute was already busy, but moving.

Weekdays are probably acceptable, but weekend travel on autoroutes during July and August are definitely to be avoided if at all possible. Traffic is very, very heavy, even with pre-dawn departures.

Toll booths (péages) cause huge blockages. We have an electronic pass card that lets us use "express" lanes, but even with that advantage the delays are painful. Without that, it's extremely painful.

Any slowdown along the autoroute, from a prior accident, lane narrowing, or some other cause, results in traffic jams (bouchons) that take hours to clear up. Passing a "bouchon" area, well after the original cause is gone, can be an hour or two of stop-go inching along. You're never stopped long enough to shut off the engine, so you're moving very slowly in a river of running motors.

Ahh. Turnoff and rest stop ahead! We'll just slide out of this mess and have a leisurely cup of coffee, a pee and relax for a few moments before rejoining the mass movement. What's this? No place to park? The rest stop is jammed. Cars circling like sharks looking for the weakness of a car pulling out and freeing a space.

Driver waits in the car while passengers go in to use the facilities and get the required number of coffees from the waiting vending machines.

Long minutes in the car and then pouncing on a vacated spot to park. Driver heads in to the facilities, ready to sip on the coffee that's been purchased for him or her. But the preceding coffee-searchers are still in the queue for the toilets, nearly half way to the front by now. Only a few more minutes to the pause that truly refreshes.

Finally refreshed! Now for the vending machines. With all the mobs, half the machines are empty or out of action. Still, some are working, so a nice cup of machine-made coffee. Ah, well, better than nothing - we suppose.

Now, back in the car, back on the road, and back on our way. Well, back on the road anyway. Remember all those other vehicles out there? It's now way past sun-up, and the early morning heavy traffic has morphed into mid-morning masses of traffic.

Take the earlier description of morning autoroute conditions and multiply by x.

Next year, vacations requiring autoroute travel will exclude July and August, and definitely exclude weekends.

First weekend July: Bad. Start of the French holidays. A third of all French in the Paris region are leaving town, mostly heading south.

July 14th weekend (Le quatorze): Very bad. Many French people now take there holidays from mid-July to mid-August.

Weekend end-July/beginning-August: Very, very bad. Le chasse croisée, where the Juilletists are returning and the Aoutians are departing on vacation. The traffic reports gleefully announce how many hundreds of kilometers of "bouchons" along the autoroutes.

August 15th weekend (Le quinze aout): Bad. The mid-July to mid-August crowd returning.

Last weekend August: Bad. The Aoutians returning from vacation, heading back to Paris.

You can check the status of French autoroutes in near-real-time online: traffic online.