France traffic free day
I’ve just got back from my travels around Avignon and the Luberon to find that today is ‘traffic free’ day in our local town. It is the same in quite a few towns across France apparently, with town centres blocked to cars.
This is a great idea I think. I’ve previously written that I like having cars in our town centre, because the local towns that have stopped cars entering tend to be nice in the summer but completely dead in the winter - ie designed for tourists not living in.
But one day a year, so that us gite owners can rush in and take photographs, is very welcome. Indeed our town (Villereal) has even launched a photo competition for the day, to see who can take the best picture of the car-free zone.
But it opens a new potential problem. I’ve taken quite a few photos of the ‘car-free-town’, and very nice some of them are - but is it deceptive if I use them on our gite website? Because strictly speaking visitors won’t see the town as it looks in the photo above, because there will be cars parked all around the medieval market hall.
And curiously, although there were barricades preventing cars entering the centre, the town still felt the need to put big signs up in the town centre explaining the ‘no-cars’ rule - and taking photographs that avoided these big signs was almost as hard as taking pictures without cars in on a normal day.
