Madrileños speeding by on the autoroute idly wondered about this bizarre apparition.
"I got it to 110 on the Autoroute," he said, or roughly 68 miles per hour.
I read to the Channel, I read on the ferry, I read south on the autoroute, I read through the Pyrenees, I read through Spain.
Part of the joy of driving the Tour is its variety: many miles on the autoroute, lots of gentle grooving along well-maintained rural roads – how, in a country this large, is there barely a pothole in la France profonde?
Just five months after the Olympics, van Damme was killed in a head-on collision, on the autoroute between Marseille and Lyon, on his way home from a training session in the south of France.
From Heart Failed, their next single, through to A Little Overcome, this gig was a monotonous meander through backstreets, rather than a joyous ride in a softtop sports car on the autoroute.
Back on the autoroute, the horrors of the traffic mocked memories of Cyril Connolly's elegant accounts of thrumming down the parallel Route Nationale 7 in a roadster with plane trees rushing past and champagne in prospect.
Indeed: If youre driving past La Plaine- Saint-Denis on the autoroute, you will see a giant pink freight container held aloft by two hulking sumo wrestlers.
But just under two years later, Helene's husband Jean-Francois had a near-fatal accident on the autoroute.
An Irish writer based in England, David Walsh, has published two books, one in French, one in English, that bring up interesting details of contraband being slipped across borders, mysterious syringes being deposited on isolated rest stops on the autoroutes.
