Reflexia beneath the stunning Millau Viaduct, France, December 2008

....continued from #MP41.

These five pages of My Pics feature photos from Reflexia's unplanned road trip around France and Spain in 2008. The full story appears in the Articles section for ease of reading. It contains all the same pictures as displayed on these pages, but with a comprehensive write-up.

Click here to read the full article, or here for a PDF version that may be more easily viewed / printed.

The trip was costing me a lot in fuel, lodging and other expenses, and it wasn't affording me the best opportunity to check out all these potential new home cities in the beginnings of a frozen, barren wintertime. I discovered that the cross-Channel ferry operator, Transmanche, had revised their sailing times favourably for the approaching weekend, so I suddenly turned my thoughts towards a straight route back up the middle of France, despite the demands of more intensive driving this would bring about. Though I'd done the north-south route in a day, I certainly didn't feel like trying to match that achievement in reverse, so my goal was now to get to somewhere in the middle of France by nightfall. To reach that target, I would take a route that would lead me via one of the engineering marvels of the modern world (above and below).

I left Montpellier and headed on to the A75, where the road began climbing ever more steeply, finally emerging at high altitudes on the plains above. Despite the cold air and the snow visible on distant mountain tops, I was driving under a clear blue sky, and the sun was beating down into the rear of my car with just enough warmth to make up for the lack of such available from my troublesome heater. After an hour or so of ascent into the Massif Central, I reached the final bend before the glorious spectacle I had been waiting for, the Viaduc de Millau.

Reflexia at the Millau Viaduct, the top piers of which are lit by the fading sunlight

Soaring through a high sky past the seventh and last pylon, I veered off into the service area, which offers a panoramic viewpoint of the viaduct, before taking a detour down into the valley below, through the busy town of Millau and out onto a small road running beside the River Tarn that I'd observed from above.

Reflexia in a quiet spot beneath the Millau Viaduct

It was certainly a worthwhile diversion, and I hit the almost empty road west as the sun lowered itself in the afternoon sky, lighting up one half of the viaduct. A turn-off at the foot of one of the immense piers takes drivers over the river and up a steep climb to a visitor information centre, but an offshoot used during the construction of the bridge provides a stopping point, which on this quiet winter weekday was devoid of any other public intruders. The two closest piers to this deepest point in the valley rise infeasibly to support the motorway one quarter of a kilometre above, with one mast reaching a record-breaking 343 metres at its peak, higher than the Eiffel Tower. It's difficult to stand at this spot and appreciate that thundering lorries and a multitude of other vehicles are hurtling along in the sky on a four-lane highway (an apt word).

The awesome scale of the Millau Viaduct can be seen here as Reflexia sits overshadowed by the mighty structure

Once I had wound my way back to the summit north of the town, it seemed that my simple strategy from here was to just drive and see how far I got. The dark of night was about to hunt me down and I had nothing more to expect out of today than a dinner and a bed. But shortly after rejoining the autoroute, and moments after the sun had hidden beneath the rear horizon, I turned a bend and was confronted with a beauty of nature's making that rivalled the magnificent experience of the man-made bridge I'd left behind. As if to compete and prove that, ultimately, nothing can outdo the phenomena of the world's own creation, a giant full moon bigger and brighter than any I'd seen before had risen above rocks resembling the Grand Canyon, against a back light of a supernatural purple and pink sky. Hurriedly, I attempted to capture a shot in motion as I drove, only to find my camera had exhausted its battery supplies after all my snapping back at the bridge. The single shot I managed to obtain (below) didn't represent the colours correctly or the drama of the scene being acted on the sky's stage, and the zoom would not function before the device retired like a shy child in a school play and refused to make another stand.

Driving in Reflexia towards a big, bright and beautiful full moon north of Millau, in a landscape resembling the Grand Canyon

For the ensuing twenty minutes, I chased the moon ahead and the view became only more sensational, with vivid hues of orange, green, yellow and blue lighting up the southern skies behind me and in my mirrors, complementing the increasingly luminous picture in front. My mobile phone camera was also dug out in my furious attempts to save the scene for posterity, but that too would utterly fail at the job of recomposing reality.

Additional image of the moonshine captured with my mobile phone (1)

Additional image of the moonshine captured with my mobile phone (2)

Additional image of the moonshine captured with my mobile phone (3)

Regular signs had been appearing giving distances to not just the bigger towns and the ultimate destination of Clermont-Ferrand to which this motorway led, but also to the Viaduc de Garabit, a superb rail bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel that I'd visited with Reflexia in 2005 (see number MP31 in this section). Constructed in 1884, it was as striking in its time as the Millau Viaduct is today. Now, illuminated spectacularly against the black of night, the puny photographic device on my ancient mobile phone was going to provide the only means for recording another monument and moment from possibly the greatest day's drive in my life.

A sorry attempt to photograph the Viaduc de Garabit using my mobile phone's lacklustre camera

After one more night spent in another FastHotel at Clermont-Ferrand, I faced one more day of solid driving in atrocious conditions, reaching my ferry at Dieppe on the north coast of France after an eight-hour sprint from the centre of the country, with one minute to spare.

I arrived back at home in England in the small hours, listening to Reflexia purring unperturbed by her exploits and the hard graft I'd put her through. More than three thousand extra miles had been added to her clock in the last twelve days, and I'd suffered not one problem along the way, aside from the dodgy heater and having to drive around a frozen Europe in an ice box. I never once doubted that it would be up to the job, and my faith was repaid by its unerring service. Almost every stage of the journey had been a real ordeal for any car, let alone a basic, lightweight model designed primarily as a rural run-around with many components' designs dating back to the early Sixties. To the residents in the vicinity of my home, the car would be back sitting there on its regular spot like nothing ever happened, only it got a bit dirtier. They would never suspect that it had been off moonlighting with a Spaniard.

Click here for a movie of Reflexia crossing the Millau Viaduct.

To read the complete version of this five-part article, visit number YA22 in the Your Articles section.

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