Briançon, Narbonne and Paris

Our route to Narbonne was via a couple of nights in the French Alps. We went over the Col de Montgenevre which is some 1850 metres with spectacular views. What really took our breath away was all the writing on the road (Contador and the like) and we realised that Le Tour worked its way up this pass only a few days earlier. We did not see any Cadel signs but his name certainly gained a lot of print when he won the Tour and is the first Aussie to have done so. We saw him on a number of occasions when we followed the Tour in 2009 tour. After being runner up twice it was absolutely brilliant to see him win.
On the way down the pass we travelled through Briançon which is the highest city in France. It has three castles on adjoining mountains. One can imagine the frustration of being able to see the enemy but having arrows fall short!
One of the attractions of the old part of the city was its claim to the main road being divided by a “river”. Reality fell short of what I imagined.

After a brief day to recover we made our way down the mountain, picked up Steve and Jilly (from the USA) at Montpelier enroute to Narbonne. It was Nancy (my cousin’s birthday - one of those decade ones) and hence we had three days of frivolity and rather too much eating and drinking. Nancy and Sasha have an interesting house but at this time of year the place to be was in the garden under the dappled light of trees. While Nancy focused on her presents.

Some had to man (person) the barbeque – a demanding job!!

While others (Steve and Jilly who appear to be needing to be introduced to one another) patiently waited for the food to be ready.

After three days of frivolities Nancy decided we should take in some of the local interests. We started at a winery (where else?) and then to the Gaul village of Enserune which was inhabited between 6th century BC and 1st century AD. This overlooks a huge agricultural development. The area was a lake which was drained and developed into a large series of fields in a circular fashion. The scale is enormous and can be appreciated by the lines of dividing trees some of which are many metres high. All this built with the tools and techniques available at the time.

Our return route from Narbonne to Paris took us over a modern day engineering feat – the Millau bridge. This is quite spectacular notwithstanding that in this picture the light on the cables make it look more like an artist impression than a real bridge. It is the tallest bridge in the world with the summit of one mast at 343 metres and with the underside of the deck level some 270 metres above the ground it is the 12th highest bridge. It is 2460 metres long.

Apart from the statistics, what is particularly interesting is that the conventional way of launching the bridge deck using rollers was likely to put to much horizontal load on the very slender and tall columns. A new launching system had to be invented. This used a moving wedge between two fixed bearers. The middle wedge was pushed thereby lifting and moving the bridge deck forwards. The wedge section was then lowered and left the deck on the two side supports. When the wedge was withdrawn so was the horizontal load. This system advanced the bridge 600mm (and repeated at a rate of 9 meters per hour). (This is the problem with an engineer writing a blog!)

We also had time for a lunchtime stop at a chateau. We spotted it just off the road and it was lunch time. Unfortunately I did not note the name and as the only tour was around the grounds and in French we meandered around on our own and omitted to collect a pamphlet.

Our trip to the Fontainebleau caravan site went better than expected and we were in time to participate on a meal at the Chez Fernand restaurant that is situated on the waterfront and was the same one we visited with Lianne and Glen in 2009.

After a lazy start we slowly made our way into Paris and as the weather was forecast to be poor decided to visit the Louvre. We had an early lunch (15:00 so it was for us) and suitably refreshed headed into the museum.

There is so much to see… We visited on a Wednesday which was late night closing. We saw the Mona Lisa – bit of a scrum to get close with so many people but we did get a photo. There are many works of art which from my perspective were far more interesting. This is one by Pannini called the Galerie de vues de la Rome antique -1758. The level of detail of each of the paintings within the painting is very fine. It measures some 3 x 2 metres to give help give a feel of the scale and the level of detail.Although we spent most of our time in one hall (Italian painters) I did flit through to the Greek hall to photograph the Milos de Venus. Three hours later we had seen 1½ halls. We will need to go back.
We left Steve and Jilly in Paris and the following day headed for the ferry and returned to Solihull to pack up the ‘van. A very short European trip of 5 weeks had flown past.