Gendarme in the traffic jam
Tourves, Var (Provence)
There's an inflation of summer events and festival in France, going from classical music to theater, jazz, gastronomy and it's been hard for mayors and their administration to find a niche in these summer cultural activities that has not yet been experimented. For small villages that can't compete with the lavish funds spent by larger
cities (from taxpayers money, that is),
it's a real challenge. But Tourves, a village located in the back country of the Var département found a cheap way out of it : re-enact every other year the old days when (before any divided highway were built) the National 7 was connecting Paris to Menton on the French Riviera. In summer Parisians would rush to the Mediterranean with their family, driving all the way down in dense traffic and a tumultuous but candid vacation euphoria. You could expect big traffic jams in bottleneck villages with their narrow main streets as there were no detour roads around cities & villages. Tourves wanted to make this all alive again, this is Le Bouchon de Tourves (the traffic jam of Tourves), with all the vintage cars available, the good mood, the mess, leaded-gazoline smell, unbridled honking and even a gendarme to try put some order in this chaos...
If you come visit Tourves for this enjoyable and non-pretentious event, you might need some calm after that mess, as well as clean air : go walk and enjoy the solitude at the remote Chapel saint Probace, no car (even vintage) will bother you over here. Bring some bread, saucisson and cool rosé in a thermos.
