For my baby boomer sisters and me, bickering in the back seat of our parents’ Cutlass Supreme, the lure of family car trips was not the destination, but the stops — the Hot Dog Johnny’s and Howard Johnsons. So a recent trip on the autoroutes of southwestern France was like a journey back to my childhood. The Poconos, of course, didn’t have vineyards, and Hot Dog Johnny’s never served foie gras. Even on the road, I discovered, the French know how to live with style.

I was visiting my friend the artist Christopher Corr, who lives north of Nîmes, when he suggested we “pop over” the Pyrenees to Bilbao and visit the Guggenheim Museum. It would be a good old-fashioned road trip, with high culture as its goal and plenty of joie de vivre along the way. So early one morning, we left the car-rental office in Nîmes in a spanking new, candy-green Renault Clio hatchback, which I promptly dubbed the Green Hornet.

Most of the autoroute (motorway/freeway) links are toll roads. Some have a toll station giving you access to a section, others have entrance and exit toll stations, and it is rather common to encounter both on the same autoroute. Don’t lose your entrance ticket or you will be charged for the longest distance plus additional fees. All toll stations accept major credit cards but you can use the automatic booth (Télépéage) only if your card is equipped with an appropriate transponder. UK citizens can now buy the transponder chip directly from Sanef in the UK at

Paying tolls is quite easy: just insert a credit card (or give it to the cashier along with your ticket) and go (Note that Maestro and Visa Electron cards are not accepted.) You can pay with coins as well. Sometimes you get a ticket to calculate the toll. You may have to slide the ticket and then the credit card into the same slot or into two different slots. Generally, though, €500 bills are not accepted at toll booths.

driving in france