The symbol of the French holidays is the traffic jam.

Holiday movements in July-August are similar to the seasonal flights of birds. They are called transhumance here, as they used to call seasonal cattle drives to new pastures.

Holiday movements in July-August are similar to the seasonal flights of birds. They are called transhumance here, as they used to call seasonal cattle drives to new pastures.

My friend, a medical professor, a frequent guest of professional international forums, decided not to come on a business trip, but to have a family vacation together. He called with an exclamation of "guard!". The price of tickets from Moscow to Nice in economy class was far beyond his ideas of reasonable expenses. We agreed that I would meet him by car in the less popular Geneva, from where we would continue our journey to the Mediterranean Sea.

During the trip, he learned a lot of interesting things that he did not know after business trips to his conferences. I was especially excited when I crossed state borders at a speed of 120 kilometers per hour ...

The day we met fatally turned out to be Saturday, which the French organization of motorists Bison Futé ("Cunning Buffalo") predicted as "black". Drivers without extreme need were not recommended to go on the road at all ...

"Black", "red" and "orange" days are the peak moments of the movement of vacationers. They can be compared with Moscow country Fridays and Sundays, only on a continental scale. Vacation starts on Monday, but who will be waiting? The "July" ones return, the "August" ones leave on Saturdays and crowd the roads together.

Everyone relaxes during these summer months. And when else? These are school and student holidays. No one will kick a Belgian or a Frenchman out on vacation, say, in November (remember the Soviet joke about warm vodka and sweaty women?). Therefore, vacation movements in July-August are similar to seasonal bird migrations. They are called transhumance here, as they used to call seasonal cattle drives to new pastures. In the fall, when prices will almost halve, the "third age" - pensioners - will go to the resorts.

Vacation for a European is sacred, a component of culture, an integral part of life. Today, mass recreation is a trip to the sea, to the mountains or to the village by car. And it all started in the 60s, when the car began to enter the life of an average family.

My Belgian friend told me how, as a child, he went with his parents in a Simka-1000 to Nice on vacation. It was a real test, a journey of discovery that took more than one day. The queue at the French border checkpoint (long live the Schengen!), then the tedious traffic in a line of cars with plugs in every village with pedestrians and traffic lights. At that time they did not yet prohibit the movement of trucks on weekends, and a lot of cars shared the road with heavy trucks. The journey of Lyon alone took more than an hour. The road infrastructure is still in its infancy: lunch is on the side of the road, the toilet is in the bushes.

The French were not yet accustomed to the comfort of highways, unlike their German and Italian neighbors, where "autobahns" and "motorways" began to be built under Hitler and Mussolini. In 1961, there were only 100 kilometers of such roads in France, but in 1967 there were more than a thousand.

Today in France, a country with an area smaller than the Central Federal District of Russia, the length of the "authorutes" exceeds 11 thousand kilometers. Moreover, several thousand kilometers were built before my eyes in the zero years, which in Europe were by no means “fat”. Little Luxembourg, the size of a small area near Moscow, during this time has almost doubled the length of its highways, bringing it to one and a half hundred kilometers. We are talking, of course, about high-speed highways, in addition to which there is also a dense network of good and free highways.

In fact, nothing is free. In the north of Europe, everyone pays for travel on motorways through the budget in the form of taxes. In the south, each driver pays for a specific section of the road that he drove. An interim solution (in Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic) is a road vignette for a fixed period. But everywhere and always you can drive along parallel highways, “nationals”, and pay nothing. Highways are free within a radius of tens of kilometers around large cities, so as not to strain the citizens in everyday trips.

But life is arranged in such a way that even a dense network of modern highways does not save you from traffic jams. Supply growth is not keeping pace with demand.

Having met a professor friend in Geneva, we decided to go to the Cote d'Azur through Italy. But road radio 107.7 warned that there was a three-hour queue in front of the Mont Blanc tunnel. True, in the Rhone Valley near Lyon and to the south, it can be even worse. Montelimar is to a French vacationer what Waterloo is to Napoleon. Somehow I already got into a traffic jam there, where children played badminton between cars, adults played cards, and teenagers managed to start holiday romances.

We make a strong-willed decision, turn off and drive along the mountainous Savoy to Grenoble and further along the "national" through the Alps. The decision, as often happens, turned out to be the worst possible one in the end ...

A car in European countries is the most democratic means of escape from everyday life. It is not used by those who spend their holidays according to the scheme "airplane - five-star hotel."

Inexpensive hotel, apartments and camping - a European vacationer rests there, who prefers the beauty and comfort of his continent to the delights of Thailand, Goa and Bali. Many carry on a trailer and camping house. The “caravan”, as the French call it, is a clumsy, annoying construction on the highway, connected to the campsite’s electrical and water networks and serving as a shelter and kitchen for the entire vacation. Cheap and cheerful.

Families with children drive by, whose cars carry "coffins" of external roof racks and bunches of bicycles over the rear bumper. Less often - a boat.

On the "motorway of the sun" E-411, which connects the shores of the North and Mediterranean seas, there are the most caravans with Dutch numbers. There are legends and anecdotes about the stinginess of the Dutch. People who have wrested a third of the territory of their flat, lowland country from the cold sea with hard work continue to save money even on a longed-for vacation trip to the southern mountains and warm sea.

Danes, Germans, Dutch and Belgians rush south. On the way, the English pour into this river from the Channel ferries and from the tunnel, the French, who rush from Paris and the cool north to the guaranteed sun of their south or further to Spain. In parallel, automobile rivers flow from the Baltic through Germany and the Alps to Italy and Croatia. Through the St. Gotthard Tunnel and the Brenner Pass.

At road stations where it's hard to find parking at lunchtime, they line up in long lines at McDonald's without even looking in the direction of the prettier self-service restaurant. Hamburgers, french fries are the food preferred by ferocious fathers of families, their housewives and eternally hungry children. The more prudent take out cooler bags and packs of dry rations and sit under the trees at picnic tables. Lines for toilets and showers, and even for baby diapers.

At the cash desks of self-service restaurants there is a strict poster with the norms for selling drinks: a mug of beer or a quarter of wine - only with a hot dish. The cashiers are relentless. Whether you are a driver or a passenger. There are also time limits on the German autobahns, but in the last two or three years the French have been especially zealous for traffic safety, ashamed of the shameful place in the EU in terms of road deaths. They put radars on the roads, raised fines, concluded agreements with neighboring countries on punishing violators and introduced a mandatory norm: along with a first-aid kit, a fire extinguisher and a reflective vest, you must have a breathalyzer on board. So that the gendarmes do not carry their stock with them ...

Vacationers are not deterred from traveling either by police fines or by the economic crisis, which is hard on the pocket. The 95th gasoline went off scale for 1.5 euros per liter, and in Italy, where the Monti government is reducing debts with draconian measures, it reached 2 euros. But this did not affect the liveliness of the Milan-Venice motorway (which is also quite expensive).

On the roads - a mixture of languages ​​​​and license plate colors. Over the past ten years, there have been noticeably more cars from Eastern Europe - from Lithuania to Bulgaria. But only once during this trip did I see a jeep with a Moscow region number in the stream between Marseille and Nice, and a couple of cars with Ukrainian cars near the Italian Lake Garda. This does not mean that there are no our compatriots on the highways. It is easier and cheaper for them to rent a car at a European airport than to drive a ton or two of their iron across Europe.

In the courtyard of the archaeological museum in San Rafael, there are two guns from the battleship Slava Rossii. He drowned in a storm off the Côte d'Azur in November 1780, and his remains rested at a depth of forty meters until 1957, when the Cousteau-Thaiet group found them under a thick layer of silt.

And in Nice, more pretentious than San Rafael, Russian speech is heard everywhere, the Russian tricolor flies over the Beau Rivage beach, and the Flower Market Square from a flea collapse in the evening in just an hour turns into a huge open seafood restaurant with a mandatory menu in Russian language. It is the most requested.

Russians are respected here. There is no merit in this of the battleship Slava Rossii, which sailed for no reason more than two centuries ago to these shores. Few people here know about him, as well as about the Bulava missile and other objects of glory of Russian weapons. Russia conquered the Cote d'Azur without a single shot, made it its colony, health resort, meeting place for its most successful representatives. It is they who raise the price of air tickets to the ceiling, it is for them that Russian Railways launched a direct train from Moscow to Nice. The army of resort service and trade workers in France adores Russians for expensive orders and purchases, for tips. And the rumors about the habits of the regulars of Cape Ferrat, where the party of the cream of the Russian Lazurka gathers, are similar to fairy tales from the Thousand and One Nights.

The professor and I were not invited there, so we had to believe the rumors. And comparing with the Dutch, German and French holiday-goers around us, one can speculate why even one thousand express highways were not built in the Central Federal District during the fat oil and gas 2000s.

The depth of love for visitors from Russia is limited by some suspicion, fueled by the opacity of Russian business. The newspaper Nice Matin, which I bought from a stall on the waterfront, had an article about the ongoing strife and litigation in the community of the Church of the Archangel Michael in Cannes. This Orthodox church, built in 1894, passed into the bosom of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2006, which many descendants of white emigrants are dissatisfied with. They rebelled against Bishop Barnabas, who, they say, facilitated this transfer and refused to disclose the origin of the 405,000 euros received for the renovation of the church.

Nice, Cannes, Monaco - this is a vanity fair, toponyms of show-offs. Well, who in Moscow can you impress by saying that you have a house, for example, in Sète (a nice seaside town in neighboring Languedoc)? But if in Nice - this is respect. True, Nice is the sixth largest city in France, whose life is not limited to resort glamour. Yes, and in Cannes, on the other side of the cape from the Croisette, in the boutiques of which beautiful kept women compete in the generosity of sponsors, there are ordinary beaches where the same ordinary European vacationer bathes.

On the Cote d'Azur from the presidential residence "Fort Bregançon" during the days of our trip, François Hollande spent his summer vacation with his girlfriend Valerie Trierweiler. He could be met in the morning on the beach, where he went down from the guarded villa to sit in a busy cafe. In an imposing polo and light trousers, the president walked along the beach, shaking hands with surprised holiday-goers and raking sand with his boots ...

The dark sides of mass summer recreation are “development” and “beautification”.

I first saw the Pont du Gard Roman aqueduct between Avignon and Nimes about fifteen years ago. Then I drove right up to him in a car, and ten minutes was enough to contemplate the architectural masterpiece against the backdrop of an almost wild landscape. Today this place is unrecognizable. A cultural and educational complex with a museum, interactive wonders, a conference room, restaurants and playgrounds requires a whole day. Entrance to the parking lot, from which to stomp a kilometer and a half to the aqueduct, costs 18 euros. Other expenses await the visitor. Hundreds of cars with families tired of lying on the beach come to the parking lot, dozens of buses with children, the disabled and Japanese tourists. Many of them would not have gone here if it weren't a stage of the tour, a “tick” in the report.

The same is on the Fontaine de Vaucluse, the mountainous source of the river, which flows directly from the cave. I didn’t get to it from the parking lot along the path of “cognitive” attractions and souvenir shops ...

Mass tourism kills the very idea of ​​tourism, creating a profit industry where it is not really needed, imposing artificial tourist meccas.

This is reminiscent of the entrance fee to Proval, which was collected by the enterprising hero of Ilf and Petrov, only on a large scale public-private partnership. It is good that the medieval mountain villages of Provence, clinging to the rocks, are not yet very affected by tourist amenities.

I don't want to see this in Russia, where, I hope, someday mass car tourism will become as commonplace as in Europe. Eco-tourism, “agrotourism”, growing in the Old World, inspires hope, when old farms and village houses become hotels, and holiday-makers disperse across the country, dissolve in nature, moving away from crowded beaches and bloated attractions.

South of France - Italy - Brussels