429. Yellow Vest

Marcilly-sur-Eure - near Tate's school

Departed camp onto empty roads, wondered why at first but then we found out. Two thousand sites of protest through France - see BBC

Detours on the way

The first of many road blockages
Spot the fuel gauge!

For the first hour we happily cruised along empty roads wondering why there was no traffic. Coming to a roundabout at Decize we could see black smoke billowing and lots of yellow vests but not much happening otherwise. Entering the roundabout we discovered that the exit was blocked by a protest. They informed us that even if they were to let us through, the road was blocked at Nevers. As luck happens we only had twenty eight kilometres of range left and had planned on filling up at Decize. We headed off the only available exit and  stopped a couple of kilometres along the road. While stopped a car with two yellow jackets  as we now called them, got out and were good enough to direct us to a automatised service station further along the road. She also said that thought the protests are every day they finish at seven in the evening. Refuelled, we ended up coming back again through the roundabout and got a big cheer and a wave as we all waved back and tooted enthusiastically encouraged by the memory of the blood letting peasants a few years back. 

Never went into Nevers

Screen grab of the protest map

We decided to press on as far as we could as we had the advantage that we could stop at a block and spend the remainder of the day in the Giantavan and chatting to the protesters, every kilometre one less than we had to do later. Arriving near Nevers, where we knew we would be stopped I could see on CoPilot GPS that the tiny road heading off to the right wasn't red meaning that our fifteen by two and a half metre rig could pass. It was more like a private lane and I know know, from experience that I can reverse pretty well out of anywhere with Fyfe being on the RT. We climbed a steep hill and could see black smoke billowing from the protest at the roundabout below. To our surprise, we made it through and were on our way again.

The deserted motorways were strange

I think we detoured to avoid obvious blockage points twice more. It was very strange as the roads were deserted. Jacqueline found a interactive online map which shed some light.

On the A77 we were shunted off twice, see the video below. Once it was so that cars drove a couple of kilometres on local roads so that no revenue was collected by the toll booths. When we got closer to Paris the protestors were at the toll stations and had tied the barriers open. Unfortunately we have an electronic tag with deducts the tolls directly from my bank account and it is not easily removed from the windscreen, in fact I remember Ed breaking his bracket trying to transfer his tag to his Vito for the boy's ski trip a couple of years back, so I didn't try and remove ours.

Apologies for the 480dpi quality, that is all the blog would allow

This is where we were forced off the empty motorway

Phoned the camp to say that we were late and why and they were very understanding which was a relief. Made it in the end and we were glad that we had pushed on as we had promised to spring Tate from the chokey tomorrow.