Paris, Germany, Poland, Belarus and home. Days 16-21 of the trip

July 30. We decided to drive from Montpellier to Paris in a single day, which is only about 770 km on the motorway. We moved quickly. Along the way we wanted to stop by the beautiful bridge near Millau and also visit Chateau de Chambord, but in the end we decided to skip the castle and just look at the bridge from different viewpoints. Later we remembered that it was Sunday, and in Europe most shops are closed on Sundays. When we reached Millau, we left the car in a parking lot by a store, went to photograph the bridge and discovered that the very store where we had parked was actually open. That was great because we were running very low on food.

Online I found a site with descriptions of the viewpoints for the bridge. I lost the site itself, but I still have the points on the map that we had prepared.

This is how the bridge looks from a small bridge in the town of Millau.

And this is how it looks from the easternmost viewpoint.

And here we captured it from the northernmost viewpoint. To get there, you need to leave the motorway and pull into the adjacent parking area.

The toll for the bridge itself is 10.1 EUR. After that we simply drove all day to Paris. Luckily we did not keep hitting toll booths constantly. We took the ticket near Montpellier and only paid for the road much closer to Paris. That came to 38.1 EUR, not counting the bridge. So altogether, bridge and motorway to Paris cost us 48.2 EUR.

We entered Paris, and immediately the traffic jams began. As we approached our hotel in Saint-Denis, we saw the following scene: lots of migrants were walking the streets, some of them drunk, all looking around with red and white eyes for someone to rob. Only later did I read that this district is densely populated by migrants. Good thing I had chosen a hotel with its own parking. Even so, we drove in wondering what would happen to our car overnight. Once we arrived, it turned out the hotel was like a fortress. Access to the grounds was by code, and the doors opened by code too. The hotel manager simply gave me the code downstairs, and we used it upstairs to open the door. In the morning there was no need to hand any keys back, we just walked out of the room and were free to go wherever we wanted. The room itself was decent: shower, toilet, bed. Everything was fine, especially considering that we had spent the previous four nights in a tent. Here we were really able to rest. But with the chaos outside the gates, we gave up on the idea of taking the metro into the center the next day. We decided to drive instead so we would not have to walk through those sketchy Paris streets.

July 31. We got up later as usual because we wanted to sleep in a real bed and recover from the tents. Had a quick bite and drove into the city center. In the morning Saint-Denis looked friendlier in terms of people, everyone was going to work and there were even white people around, but the amount of trash on the roads was huge. The whole district felt like one giant dump.

We reached the center, left the car in the underground parking of some hypermarket and went for a walk. We crossed the bridge that used to be covered with love locks, but it turned out all the locks had been removed. The fence had been redesigned in a way that made it impossible to hang anything on it anymore.

Then we accidentally came across Notre Dame Cathedral. We had originally marked it incorrectly on our map and could not find it at first, but later, after we had more or less forgotten about it, we stumbled upon it ourselves.

After walking around a bit more, we went back for the car and paid 10.5 EUR for parking. Then we moved by car to another part of the city, closer to the Eiffel Tower. We parked underground there as well and walked to the tower. We thought we would get up it quickly and everything would be great, but not at all. We had to stand in a huge line. I had been on the tower in 2012, but the line was nowhere near as long back then. We were exhausted by the waiting. First we queued to enter the area under the tower, then queued for the ticket office, then queued for the elevators, and at every next elevator we waited and waited again. The line down was as bad as the line up. So be prepared to stand in queues for a very long time. Or maybe there is some trick, like arriving earlier. We were there around lunchtime. After visiting the tower, we went looking for somewhere to eat because we were extremely hungry. On TripAdvisor I found a reasonably cheap and decent cafe. We had a snack there for 14 EUR and then went back to get the car from the parking lot, which ended up costing 25 EUR, though we had expected something like that. That was basically it. By the time we left, it was getting dark and it had even started to drizzle a little, so we got lucky with the weather. Originally we had planned to reach Paris in two days, but once I realized that would mean walking around Paris in the rain, I changed the plan. So we got there in one day, spent the next day walking around, and left the day after that. Right then the rains began.

August 1. We slept in, checked out of the hotel and drove toward home. Paris did not want to let us go immediately, so of course we took a wrong turn somewhere and had to circle around its streets a bit longer. There was nothing especially interesting that day. We drove a little through Luxembourg, entered Germany and, after covering about two thirds of the way through it, stopped for the night at a campground. Naturally we did not find it on the first try, but only on the third. Overall it was fine. Nothing special, except that the grass was wet and full of slugs, but by then we were used to things like that.

August 2. Again we drove hard all day and made it almost to the German-Polish border. On the way we stopped at a place we had planned in advance, Bastei Bridge.

It was quite nice there, and we spent a fair amount of time walking around.

Then we found a campground and checked in. The man who settled us in spoke only German, not English, and once again I somehow managed to communicate with him.

Before checking in, we had also stopped at supermarkets to buy wine and beer as gifts to bring home, and I found my favorite treat, a pastry once called "Negro heads" but now simply called crembo. We ate well and went to sleep.

August 3. We got up, packed and drove on. In one day we managed to cross all of Poland, pass the border and check into a guesthouse in Brest. It was already dark and around 10 p.m. Before the border, of course, we stopped again at the Viking cafeteria where we had eaten earlier. We spent about five hours at the border. What surprised me was that on the Polish side the border queue looked like some kind of criminal post-Soviet showdown: everyone stood in one line, but some people kept a window open and let through cars that had arrived much later than the others.

August 4. We wanted to get up early, but overslept and left late. I decided we should drive all the way in one day and not stop anywhere else so we would still have one rest day at home. That is exactly what we did. By 6 p.m. we were already somewhere near Smolensk and had lunch at a gas station. In the end we were home around 1 a.m., having driven 1200 km that day.

So the total route length was 8910 km, and the total spending was about 157000 rubles. Twenty-one days on the road.