beautiful countryside

We rented a car and drove from Roanne to Bordeaux.  It took us five hours and we had no mishaps and a nice lunch on the way.  Here is what we saw on the drive (except for the Gendarmerie convoy as I wasn't sure pictures would have been allowed and I did not want to cause an international incident)

Oh my goodness!  We are going 130 -- oh wait, that's km/h not mph :) -- still, at 80.77 mph we were obeying the posted speed limit and getting to our destination in good time.

It was a beautiful day, but HOT (approaching 103°F).  It was the first time it had been that hot and it hasn't been as hot since.  Some weird little quirk of weather.  We were grateful that the car had a great AC system and that we had nothing else planned for the day except to be in the car.

One of the sunflower fields along the route.  We passed some that had more and larger flowers, but it was hard to get a picture from the car window.  You can just make out the corn growing in the fields behind the sunflowers.

View from where we stopped for lunch.  We are pretty much agreed that although we are in latitude with Minnesota and Wisconsin, the place looks more like California (San Francisco and the Sonoma and Napa Valleys)

More of the hills and mountains -- this is part of the volcanic region (currently inactive)

A "natural" passageway for deer and wild boar to cross over the highway.  There were several such "overpasses" on the way as well as highway signs reminding drivers of the possibility of deer in the road.

A billboard advertising a landmark (sorry it is a bit blurry, 130 km/h you know)

We crossed over several gorges (either rivers or just deep valleys), but this was the most interesting bridge that we saw.  Here we are looking at it as we start to cross and the next picture shows the support on the other end.  The cables in the middle were yellow and the rest of it was white.  It is a pretty bridge and the valley floor is far below.

 

  Lots of fields along the way -- corn, sunflowers, cows, wheat, grapevines, and . . .

Hay y'all!  :)