Have you just started your vacation, are you driving to Lloret de Mar, and do you immediately end up in Southern European forest fires? NU.nl spoke to the newly married couple Rick and Ayse and two recent high school graduates who were stuck in traffic for hours in the area.
The fire started on Monday afternoon in a wooded area south of Narbonne, located in the south of France. The fire spread quickly. Several villages in the area have been evacuated. There is also a fire in Spain. In the map below you can see which areas are affected.
Several major roads, including the A9 running from France to Spain, were closed for a long time. This was a safety measure by the police to prevent people from being surprised by the fire. The safety measures caused significant traffic congestion.
‘Unusually Much Trouble’
Rick (26) and his wife Ayse (25), shown below in the photo, are on their way to L’Estartit, a town on the Spanish coast. They left early Tuesday morning from Montpellier in the south of France, where they had a stopover of a few hours to recover from their long drive from the Netherlands. The couple has had “unusually much trouble” with the closed (highways). “We were supposed to be at the campsite at 8 am, but now it will be 11 am.”
“The police kept closing the roads in front of us,” says Rick. “So what does everyone do? They grab Google Maps for new routes towards Spain.” And Google Maps sent all those cars over the same small back roads; most major roads were closed after all. That also applied to buses and trucks, which could not always pass each other on the narrow local roads.
“We were stuck for more than half an hour several times in a procession of trucks that could not pass each other,” says Rick. Sometimes it was “fifty large vehicles,” all of which had to back up. It was simply not possible to pass each other.
The couple has now arrived at their destination. They are not so worried about the forest fires in Spain. “If it gets really hot, we’ll jump into the sea.”
‘Completely Stuck Until 10 AM’
For the sixteen-year-old friends Jinte and Fenna, the holiday is also going slightly differently than planned: they have been virtually stationary for more than six hours. The girls are traveling together for the first time after their high school exams. They left with the bus around 2 PM on Monday through a travel agency towards Lloret de Mar in Spain.
But since Tuesday 5 AM, they have been stuck around the town of Fabrezan in the south of France. “We were completely stuck until 10 AM,” says Jinte. “Now we are moving very slowly.”
Fortunately, the friends do not notice anything of the fire itself. “Only of the closed roads.” Jinte and Fenna share the bus with about 55 others. There was initially a somewhat tense atmosphere, because no one knew what to expect. Now the mood is “fine again”.
The girls still have about three hours to go before they arrive at their holiday destination, but they take into account that it will take even longer. Still, they keep hoping. Jinte: “We are very annoyed by the long journey, but we are looking forward to the holiday.” Although they will fly next time, she thinks.