Road Tripping

A couple of snaps from some of the smaller towns we stopped along the way during our Côte d’Azur road trip…

Bormes-les-mimosas, a little mountaintop town studded with palm trees. Plage de l’Estagnol and Plage du Pellegrin, beautiful small beach coves backed by pine forest and single lane roads lined with vineyards. Antibes, for a walk on the city wall along the big blue sea.

I think part of the fun with road trips is to leave a lot of room for things to go hilariously wrong. And they did.

Here are my tips for road tripping in the South of France:

• Get a refillable European credit card (the kind with a chip) at the airport and put some money on it. Outside of Paris, some places have trouble reading the magnetic strips on American cards. There are tolls/automated ticket machines that don’t accept magnetic strip cards or even cash, just credit cards with a chip. Alicia and I found this out the hard way, with a line of cars waiting behind as we pressed the emergency operator button on a toll machine and attempted our best French to explain our situation.
• Learn how to program the car GPS (I wouldn’t do a road trip without it) so you know what route you’ll be taking. South of France roads are all about stomach churning curves. One day we made the mistake of unknowingly choosing a challenging route famous for its crazy multiple hairpin turns that went up a mountainside. Never again. Don’t forget a car charger for your phone and an adaptor/Jambox for your own music. The French oldies radio station is cute the first hour of driving then you’ll be dying to listen to something else.
• Outside of Paris, a lot of people don’t speak English. So it’s good to really brush up on your French, especially the words on road signs.
• I forget how modest the French are when it comes to nudity. On the beach, people change openly and the majority of women are topless. You can use this to your advantage and not have to sit in a bathing suit the whole car ride. We got really good at changing into swimsuits on the beach and in parking lots.
• Part of the fun is stocking up on beautiful fruit at farmers markets as there aren’t many grocery stores on the road and restaurants have limited hours. Anytime we got change we threw it in a coin purse kept in the car for tolls.
• You could imagine with two girls traveling together how many clothes Alicia and I wanted to take. So we made a rule to only bring one carry on sized suitcase and one duffle bag each since we would be hopping from one place to the next. By the end of the trip, with our souvenirs, we were sitting on top of the small suitcases to get them to zip shut. So I would pack even less for next time. I jotted down on my phone’s notepad what I ended up wearing so that next time I only bring those things.
• Just go with it. Nothing is going to go perfectly on the road and some hotels or restaurants are going to have its quirks. Kindness goes a long way and we made plenty of fast friends from just staying positive all the time.

Looking forward to doing this again soon. For a future South of France road trip I would add a visit to Porquerolles, which a few locals suggested. I would also like to someday visit France’s other coast, with Biarritz and Guéthary.

But up next, Costa Rica…

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