No Exploding Cars, or the Surrealist French Highway System

If you saw the above image on the road, what would you imagine it meant? This was all over certain French highways. My American friends and I wondered, does it mean your car isn't allowed to explode on this highway? Does is mean beware of spontaneous combustion because other cars DO tend to explode on this road? Beware of car bombs? Is it a really dramatic warning against overheating your engine? The Exploding Car Sign baffled us completely and seemed like a slightly inauspicious beginning to our Great Alsacian Roadtrip Adventure. We had a cute little blue Peugeot rental car and I really doubted that Europecar auto insurance covered us against French highway-induced spontaneous combustion...

I feel like driving is the one area in which I really cling to my Americaness, where France really does seem foreign to me. I'm used to signs that hang above lanes of traffic that give maybe one or two pieces of information at a time, not clusters of 5,000 different arrows pointing in the directions of 5,000 different towns that are displayed only along the side of the road where you often don't have time even to read them all. Even glancing at speed limit signs and my spedometer was a foreign experience at first, as it's all in kilometers so speed limits tend to be 130 (if it's not raining), instead of 65 and the spedometer went up to 230 instead of like 130.

I come from the land of freeway systems with colverleaf pattern on-ramps, where exits are well marked as are the ROADS themselves, and where you have a map of everything. Everyone in CA had these spiral-bound notebook maps (the Thomas map, I think it was called) that show all roads in the state. Such a thing doesn't seem to exist here and even the 15 maps we brought along were somehow all inaccurate and useless. And a waste of paper, as they don't print maps double-sided in France. Navigating downtown San Francisco, tolls on the Bay Bridge, highway 1 along sheer cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean-- these are all easy and logical driving maneuvers to me. The French highway system, however, was a little like driving on another planet that somewhat resembled my own.

On Planet Autoroute Francaise, tolls were very different. They're called peages, which made all us non-native French speakers think of pieges (traps). In CA, you only pay tolls for bridges. In France you seem to pay them every 5 feet on the major highways, maybe to pay for all the exploding car signs which might be expensive to manufacture. We saw some pretty shocking driving and indulged in some, too. We had this one toll plaza experience where everyone started backing up an changing toll lanes. It was total chaos and I ended up changing my lane, too, since there was a tractor trailer engaged in a customs battle with the toll attendant. After waiting 10 minutes, I, too, reversed across 3 toll lanes in front of about 15 enormous trucks to change gates. This remains to date one of my sketchiest traffic maneuvers ever... However, roadside rest areas are pretty similar to what we have in the states and we felt almost shamefully at home at the gas station mini-mart where we stopped somewhere between Metz and Paris.

In the French countyside, they didn't even really label the roads. The Alsacian wine route is actually 3 roads and looking for the little wine route sign made this drive a bit of a scavenger hunt experience... There was also this very misleading sign advertising parking, and I foolishly believed it and ended up more or less driving into the courtyard of an orange monestary converted into a winery. We also sometimes lost track of the main road and ended up in front of cathedrals in little French towns smaller than the average Parisian metro station.

I do have to admit, though, that I really enjoyed driving in France-- it made me feel like I was conquering France to speed down the autoroute in a Peugeot at 130 km/h. We spent most of our time at first being lost, but figuring out the signs and trying to navigate this strange system succfessfully was definitely like a big puzzle to figure out. I felt like we were lab rats slowly learning to negotiate the maze successfully and then we would be rewarded with cheese, which we were in Strasbourg where everything edible is covered with delicious munster cheese.

And the actual answer to the exploding car sign? It means that vehicles carrying flammable materials aren't allowed on that road. Which never occured to us, in all our various attempts to interpret it and makes me wonder exactly how many explosive materials are transported in France, considering how often we saw this sign.