America boasts 'fly over states', the big bit in the middle that few people visit unless they have to, like Iowa or Nebraska. The central 'great plains' are shaped by the Mississippi's enormous watershed. France has a more modest equivalent formed by the watershed of the Loire.
We've just driven from Dreux to Bruère-Allichamps. Dreux is situated in the north of the 'Eure et Loir' - a truly watershed department, the river Eure is a tributary of the Seine, the Loir, as the name indicates, flows into its near namesake. As for the town itself the place illustrates nicely my theory about France's overlooked middle. We've used the place's unlovely Camping-car Park in the industrial outskirts a few times. It's a convenient stopping place when heading south towards the Loire and beyond. The spectacularly brutalist industrial structure overlooking the aire frequently features in reviews, the comments tend to be disparaging.
I quite like it, brutalism was the predominating architectural style of my youth, as a mid-century adolescent, raw concrete, prog rock and existentialism shaped my outlook!
We've never made it into Dreux's 'centre ville'. On Streetview it looks nice enough, a few ancient monuments and pedestrianised shopping streets....
However that's not why the town makes the national news every so often. From time to time France's 'culture wars' hit the headlines. Generally the skirmishes tend to be risible rather than menacing. For example, this summer the mayor of Mandelieu-la-Napoule, near Cannes, relit a decade old controversy by attempting to ban the burkini on the town's beaches, uniquely making the resort somewhere you get into trouble for covering-up rather than over enthusiastically stripping off.
Intractable issues lurk beneath these absurdities. Every so often the troubled relationship between France's North African citizens and La Republique's secular values boils over. Cars get torched in the banlieues of Parisian satellite towns or the public housing blocks of Roubaix and Marseille. Pitched battles ensue between local youths and the riot police. Surprisingly Dreux often gets a mention too. About 35% of its population is of North African heritage, not something you might expect a neat country town in the middle of nowhere. Dreux is also blighted with high levels of income inequality and youth unemployment. The first time we stopped here was a few days after one of these periodic flare-ups. Wrecks of burned out cars littered the outskirts, the tarmac at the entrance to the town's centre commerciale was scorched where a barricade of burning tyres and been erected. Today all was calm and the same centre commerciale was busy, maybe things are improving in Dreux, we speculated.
Our preferred route south towards Languedoc is to head down the free A75 motorway across the Massif Centrale south of Clermont Ferrand. We've experimented with all kinds of ways of getting from the Loire valley to Clermont Ferrand using a variety of toll free route national - directly south from Orleans using the D2020 towards Bourges and Moulins; alternatively following the Loire as it arcs southwards, using the D952 via Sancere and Nevers. Actually there is little to choose between them, they are both slow, with lots of roundabouts and villages that look depopulated and god forsaken, their only remarkable feature being over enthusiastic traffic calming and peculiarly over-designed lanp-posts.
We're definitely not in 'la belle France' hereabouts. I wondered if there was a phrase in French to describe the bleak departments in the 'middle bit'. My new travel buddy 'Chatgpt,' suggested two: 'terretoires fragile' or 'La France du vide' - empty France. Taking inspiration from my own 'moniker' '- drive through departments' - this time we decided to do exactly that. Instead of crawling down the truck choked 'route nationales' we opted to use toll motorways - not cheap, about £50 for a journey of 200 miles. The upside is it's a lot less stressful. With the cruise control set at 90kph, trundling along equidistant from the truck in front and the one behind, the kilometres tick by. It's less exhausting. Perhaps I need to acknowledge that age is catching up with me, I definitely get more tired driving day after day than I did a decade ago. These days we are not travelling on a shoe-string budget like we were when we first started travelling long term back in 2014, so why make things trickier than they need be for the sake of saving a bit on motorway tolls?
As you might expect travelling has changed over the last ten years, not always for the better. There are far more motorhomes than there used to be in southern Europe even outside of the crowded summer period. We were not the only ones planning an itinerant retirement! These days turning up on spec expecting to find a free pitch near the Med in France in the autumn or during the winter in southern Spain is a thing of the past. You need to book ahead. Some things have improved though, for example the Campingcar Park chain of motorhome aires in France has an app that allows you to book ahead on-line. We used three on the journey south, at Dreux, Bruère-Allichamps and Massiac. The latter two, like an increasing number of the Campingcar Park sites, are situated in former Camping Municipals.
They have a more bucolic ambience than the majority of Campingcar Parks, which inadvertently for English motorhomers hint at the downside most 'aires de camping-car' - they are convenient, but you are camping in a car park.
Having spent most of the post dismissing the France's drive through departments as bleak and somewhat god forsaken, in fact not everywhere conforms to the stereotype. Bruère-Allichamps is a pleasant village, more prosperous looking than most, possibly because of its proximity to the city of Bourges.
The place's claim to fame is that it is located in the geographical centre of France, so I guess being the middle of somewhere means I can't really accuse it of being in the middle of nowhere! Moreover, it has an excellent traditional Boulangerie. Sadly the place had sold out of croissants and pain chocolate by the time we presented ourselves somewhat tardiy at 11.30am on a Sunday morning. The baguette was excellent however, unlike the pallid simulcra on offer in supermarkets. Maybe I'm being unfair about France's 'fragile' middle bit, but I love the south. Mediterranean landscapes are my happy place, and that's where we will be tomorrow.