Paging Ace - Travel through France question

Do you know what the E54 between Langres, Vesoul and Lure is like if one is
in a hurry? And in a cage?

Just trying to work out a decent route to get to my mum's near St Moritz and
after some tweaking this appears to be the potentially most appealing and
also shortest route (with a couple of mountains in the way though). And I'd
rather drive through France than doing the slog through
Belgium/Netherlands/Germany which is motorway all the time and usually nicely
clogged, too.

 

I may have done it on the bike once, but from that I really don't
think I can give much of an idea. But it's an N road[1] going through
quite a few villages and towns so I imagine it's not going to be
amazingly fast, but then generally not likely to be subject to massive
traffic problems. And AFAIR none of the towns are big enough to have
the detours round them that are so fucking annoying in parts of
France.

Your idea would be to pick up the A36 at Belfort, via Mulhouse to
Basel, would it? If not, and you try to use N roads from Belfort, it
will be very slow, although you'll pass within a couple of miles of
our house, where you'd be welcome to stop in of course.

But TBH when I've been driving from the North I've always tended to
stick a little bit further east, via Luxembourg, thence Nancy, Epinal,
Remiremont and Mulhouse. This is a pretty decent road for most of the
way, with long sections of scenic (and non-péage) dual carriageway
down past Epinal and a slower, but not too slow, N[2] road down to
Mulhouse.

[1] Although I had to look at a map to work this out - who on earth
uses these nasty E numbers anyway?
[2] The N66, aka E512, according to mappy.
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..'_/_|_\_'. Ace (brucedotrogers a.t rochedotcom)
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And what's wrong with clogs? Eh?

 

My god it's a SpeteBot

 

That's fair enough - my main worry is that it would be completely
clogged up and hence take hours longer than expected.

That's the idea - A5 until Langres, then across to the A36, cross into
Switzerland near Basel and then going east until I hit the Rhine
Valley. Hop over a couple of mountains there and I'm be almost there.

TBH I don't really care about the peage, given the amount of fuel an
RX-7 burns at cruising altitude the cost of the peage won't make much of
a difference.

The problem with going further east is that it'll mean going through
Belgium again and I hate that (especially the bit around Brussels) with
a vengeance. When we took the bike to see my mum last year we took the
slightly more northern route via Metz and I found that a lot nicer than
doing the Belgium/Luxembourg thing.

 

They're *so* wrong when they make up the traffic around Brussels.

 

The Swiss Motorway now joins through directly from the French border,
going under and around Basel, so it'd be worth using it at that point,
unless you're trying to avoid buying a Vignette.

But coming back into Basel, particularly late on a Sunday evening,
it's well worth the detour round from Rheinfelden past Lörrach and
Weil am Rhein, as the motorway into Basel is all dug up for widening
and can cause terrible tailbacks. Fine in non-busy periods, mind.

No, that's not my priority either, but IMO it's a better road.

The route I do from the channel is pretty boring, it's true, but goes
nowhere near Brussels. I drop down from Dunkirk, skirting Lille, then
Mons, Charleroi, Namur and thence Luxembourg and Metz. I've never seen
the point in sticking on the French motorways, which add some mileage
to the route, as well as the péage and the more expensive petrol, but
if I were going to do so I'd go more South-East from
Chalons-en-Champagne and then across via St. Dizier to Nancy, rather
than the more Northerly route to Metz.

--
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..'_/_|_\_'. Ace (brucedotrogers a.t rochedotcom)
\`\ | /`/ GSX-R1000K3 (slightly broken, currently missing)
`\\ | //' BOTAFOT#3, SbS#2, UKRMMA#13, DFV#8, SKA#2, IBB#10
`\|/`
`

 

Na, I don't mind buying one - I can always ebay it off here if
necessary. I'm trying to go for the quickest way so I'll try to use as
much motorway as possible.

OK, I'll try to map this out and see what I get...

 

Got to agree. When I do it, since I drive overnight, then the usually
packed Luxembourg roads are deserted.

I do a similar route on the run to the sun which goes :

Calais
Lille
Tournai
Mons
Charleroi
Namur
Luxembourg
Metz
Nancy
Epinal
Mulhouse
Basle (Hello Ace)
Luzern
Lugano
Milan
Parma
Bologna
Florence
Rome

Getting the 11pm chunnel, you can be parked up at Aces at 06:00 by
slow car. I can only imgine how quick it can be done in a quick one.

IIRC, the ESA record for London-Rome was 17Hrs by someone in a Beemer
doing the French autoroutes. My route cunningly avoids any Peage until
Italy.

Cheers,

Paul.

 

That doesn't sound particularly quick, TBH. It's about 7 as I drive it
(i.e. at around 80-90, with petrol and coffee stops) from the channel
to here, and a bit less to Florence, like what we did last week, so
with a couple more to cross the channel and an hour to Rome that time
sounds perfectly reasonable, so if you were really booting it in a
decent car I'd have thought 14h wouldn't be out of the question.

But by **** it's expensive there, isn't it? Just getting down from
Como to Florence cost us about 25 EU, IIRC.

--
_______
..'_/_|_\_'. Ace (brucedotrogers a.t rochedotcom)
\`\ | /`/ GSX-R1000K3 (slightly broken, currently missing)
`\\ | //' BOTAFOT#3, SbS#2, UKRMMA#13, DFV#8, SKA#2, IBB#10
`\|/`
`