France in Winter

For three seasons France is a delightful place to tour around by motorhome. In winter it becomes tricky. Many campsites close and municipal authorities turn-off the water at most of the public service points. Reviews on Campercontacts and Park-for-night can help, but it's a matter of luck finding a recent entry for any particular locality.

Yesterday was a case in point. The parking area we used in 2014 by the Lac du Saligou had been relocated to another part of the lakeside country park and the service point had gone. Luckily we we had enough water to see us through the night and did not require a grey water or WC emptying point. 

Next morning Gill consulted 'Park-for-night' and found a nearby service point. It was new, located at the E Leclerc petrol station on the motorway junction at Clermont l'Herault. Reviewers mentioned it was a 'Flot Blu'. So we headed there more in hope than expectation having had little previous success with these automated service points. They have potential disfunction in-built as a design feature. A few machines are free, some are coin operated, most require tokens. Sometimes these are available at a nearby tourist information office or municipal camping receptions. If you are planning to motorhome in France regularly keeping a stash of 'jeton' somewhere is a good idea. We have been in Spain for months so we hadn't 

In fact the much vaunted Flot Blu was not located in the service station but in the corner of the automatic car wash place next door. This is where having a qualified geographer on board comes into its own, without Gill's iron resolve we would never have found it. Of course the thing wouldn't work, the water was turned off, the tokens provided by the car wash guy would not work and none of his many keys would open the door to turn the water on. Luckily we had happened upon a rare thing, a helpful French worker - he found us an alternative source of 'eau potable' on the edge of a nearby field, though we did have to lug the water to the van in our 20 litre jerrycan. So, in the end we got sorted despite the useless Flot Blu.

Onwards, 250kms north up the A75, a spectacular drive through wild country. No matter how many times you cross the viaduct at Millau it is impossible not to be a little awestruck by the sight, a truly beautiful construction, the marriage of form and function transcends mere engineering, it is a work of art.

The same cannot be said of the visitor centre at the northern end of the bridge which manages to encapsulate everything in French culture associated with pompous over-design; for example the artful, subtlety lit displays all about cheese. More fundamental to the visitor experience, it is regretable that the same level of engineering nous that built the bridge had not been applied to the sanitary arrangements. It's quite important not to apply design principles that inspired the Trevi fountain to the toilet flush mechanism.

More bare hills and empty sky. The highest peaks of the 'Parc Volcan' were dusted with snow. The A75 climbs then dips crossing the valleys of the Tarn, Aveyron and Lot before heading towards the upper valley of the Allier. We were heading to an aire a few kilometres north of St Flour, in the Cantal.

We knew nothing of our planned destination apart from its name and two facts gleaned from Campercontacts reviews, the aire's service point worked in winter and the village had a much praised cheese shop. Massiac boasted both these delights and in fact was a rather pleasing place altogether. It's appearance is somewhat drab and dour, but then hill towns often are.

It seemed like a thriving little place with excellent local shops, cafes and specialist patisseries advertising 'macarons' - which appeared to be local delicacies, along with Cantal cheese of course.

I was drawn to a small museum dedicated to a local artist -Elise Rieuf. Sadly the place only opened on Sundays during the winter months, but from the pictures on the poster she seemed to be a skilled practitioner working in a post-impressionist figurative style. I tracked down the museum's somewhat basic website from a link on Google maps.

It contained more examples of  Rieuf's work and information about her life. It is a remarkable story which took her from this obscure Auvergne town to Paris, Germany, the French Quarter of Shanghai, then a life of travel around Europe, all reflected in her work. .Elise Rieuf is a significant example of a pioneering independent woman determined to live a life on her own terms.

The most famous artist from this area in France is Pierre Soulages. His studio in Rodez has a museum dedicated to his work. So far as the masters of mid-twentieth century painting go, aged 99, he is more or less the last one standing. His dark abstract canvases are the epitome of mid 20th century avante garde, utterly different to the intimate figurative paintings of Elise Rieuf.. The history of last century's 'realists' is an intriguing one, not all of them rejected Moderism simply because they were conservatives, but preferred using traditional methods to explore the realities of the society around them. Women artists like Elise Rieuf or Laura Knight in Britain are the equivalents, I think, to literary figures such as Virginia Woolf or Simone de Beauvoir. They lived their lives in deliberate opposition to Beauvoir's observation concerning received cultural norms: 

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

One day perhaps I will get to visit both the Soulages and the Rieuf museums and finally to decide if my hunch is right - that Soulages' work conforms to de Beavoir's assertion but Rieuf's quietly confounds it.

So, there is more to Massiac than an impressive cheese shop and 'artisnal macarons'.The big wide world and remote places are idiosyncratically entwined; the small-scale can conceal big ideas; winkling them out is what makes travel fascinating.