After driving ourselves quite hard the last few days, we've opted to leave Switzerland a day early and do the trip to Calais in two days rather than the planned one. We opted to take the route across the Jura this time, and very pleasant it was on such a fine day. We did a bit of the route through the Franche-Comté on secondary roads rather than motorways, partly for the want of choice and elsewhere by choice - it takes longer, but uses a lot less fuel and of course, we save the toll. All of which will help to pay for a night in a hotel here on the outskirts of Reims. We used a couple of stretches of motorway later, since the landscape of the Champagne country is not among France's most spectacular.
As we rumble along the French motorways, we play a sort of I-spy, looking for incongruous pairings of tractors and trailers, and indeed for trucks from unusual places. There were a couple of trucks from Belarus on the Languedocienne, for example, and elsewhere we came across curious mixtures such as French trailer, Romanian tractor, Polish-Swedish, Czech-Austrian, Romanian-Belgian and all the rest. It's still quite exciting to think that frontiers that were made of concrete and steel during my adolescence are now open. But the big question is why so much of this stuff is being transported by road in the first place, given the superb rail and waterway networks round the continent. Switzerland is pressing on with the low-level tunnels under the alps, and I hope will have the sense to tariff transit lorries on to flatbeds at an attractive price compared with fuel costs and toll charges. It can't afford to repeat the British mistake of wrecking the railway system in favour of our now terminally constipated road 'system'.
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