Millau- A bridge to return to

Today was to be a longish journey. We were heading for Italy, but on route a couple of stops, a bridge I had wanted to see for a long time and the Verdon gorge, two inspirational pieces of engineering, one created by man, the other by god, well more precisely, the erosion of rock by water over millions and millions of years.

We had arrived quite late back in the home of the Motorhoming Aire, France. We awoke quite late. A gentle knocking from somewhere, we ignore it. Eventually Susana gets up, puts on the heating and starts to prepare breakfast. She also opens the blinds. Outside two policemen are waiting just by the window!

What have we done wrong. Have our fellow travellers complained about us arriving late? This is not a good return to France. We open the door to them and they hand us a piece of paper. Have we been fined? No, they want €6, the fee for the aire. We let out a guilty sign of relief, fill with water, empty the grey water tank and leave.

The journey takes us up the coast past Perpignan, before heading inland. We take the opportunity to pop in to a motorhome shop where we buy a replacement kitchen tap which has been leaking and I haven’t been able to fix. It takes an hour to replace. All the stuff is removed form the cupboard so I can get at the tap. It is a little awkward but not to bad, and before long she is up and running again.

We have subsequently found that we are using perhaps 3-5 litres of water less a day, that is the waste from that slightly dripping tap! Other things we notice, we do not have an automatic pump that turns on with the taps. Dora is a little primitive for that sort of progress. We turn her pump on manually. It gets up to pressure and stays there much quicker. Now the tap is not leaking.

We head inland where the landscape gets more and more stunning, with high barren cliffs which look impossible to cross.

A long tunnel, the other side and we are on a large plateau. Signs begin to appear showing Millau.

We pass a few small settlements, but it is pretty desolate here with not much agriculture.

And then, the motorway begins a long gradually descent, before dropping onto the Millau viaduct.

The bridge is engineering simplicity. Seven masts, suspended from each, a section of the motorway.

Perspex planks deflect the wind in this exposed location.

The cables, reflect this simplicity, straight simple and elegant. We quickly pass over and the bridge is behind us. We need to find another vantage point to see it. Just beyond the French have seen fit to build such a vantage point. They are very proud of this bridge, so they should be.

It is only when seeing from afar can you truly appreciate the scale. The valley that it crossed is enormous. Each of the columns, gigantic.

The stopping area after the bridge also contains a tourist information point and an exhibition about the bridge. The bridge was built in just three years, and they use some really innovative methods to construct it.

The deck that the car drive across is steel. It is hollow, made up of a lattice of struts to keep it light but strong. These were assembled towards the edges of the valley and then slowly pushed across by large hydraulic rams.

We wanted to seek another vantage point to view the bridge. We wanted to look at it from below. We descended into Millau and eventually found a road that passed below the viaduct. The bridge just gets bigger and bigger.

But still remains majestic.

The only real sculptural element is the way the columns split into two tapering outwards and then come back to a point. Beautiful, but I am not sure if there is any engineering purpose. Maybe it is to reduce the material, the amount of concrete cast. From the construction photos it appeared that the columns were in fact hollow.

The day we saw it the weather was crystal clear. I have seen images where the bridge appears to float across the valley on a sea of clouds.

Maybe we will have to return one day to experience that. Like many large projects, to be truly successful requires the collaboration of all the people involved; the client, the builder, the engineer and the architect, to name but a few. It was a shame that the exhibit, obviously sponsored by the builder, did not really recognise this collaboration. Any mention of the rest of the team was very much within the small print.

The client	The French government
The builder	Eiffage
The engineer	Michelle Virilogeux
The architect	Noman Foster and partners

We headed through Millau, taking a route across country, towards the Verdon gorge. The road initially followed the gorges de La Dourrie, which was spectacular.

 

These are the real advantages of travelling by motorhome. The travelling through somewhere. The discovery of a place, a landscape, unexpected. A place you had not planned to see, you just come across it. Maybe if you were on a car tour you may chose this route, but you would probably be booking the hotel beforehand.

We have come across many unexpected places, places of real beauty. Sometimes this is a result of our meanness, as we seek a free aire with free facilities.

The reality is this probably costs us more in fuel as we search for them in remote locations. It gets us away from the crowds on the coast, that has little interest to us, and reveals the more beautiful of landscape.

We pulled over often, to allow cars to pass us.

The road was  slow, winding and followed a fast flowing river.

And we passed through many small villages, too small to appear in our atlas.

I don’t think they see many tourists here. I don’t think they see many motorhomes.

The building cling to the sides of the valley, like the cliffs above them.

We stopped further down the valley in an aire at Aveze. We spend a peaceful night in a glorious location.

GDR