Do not let it put you off coming to the Var.
No matter how crowded the département gets in July and even more so in August, it is not my intention to deter you from making your visit, least of all when there is still my Le Lavandou competition to enter.
Var Matin ran its scary headline across the top of page one, three days after a horrific crash that occurred when a young man drove his VW Polo the wrong way along the A8 motorway near Fréjus and ran smack into a Peugeot 205.
Two men inside the Peugeot were killed. A couple and a child were injured when their car ran into the wreckage a minute or two later.
The newspaper's headline: 80 contresens par an sur les autoroutes varoises
You'd think such an appalling thing could come along only once in a blue moon. It's what you associate with the doddery octogenarian who somehow finds himself or herself ambling along the M1 in the face of oncoming traffic.
Yet the presumed culprit in the story of the fatal pile-up is just 22, and what he did happens all too often, according to the Var Matin statistic.
Drink and drugs are naturally involved in many of the cases, as indeed are the elderly people who have simply arrived at their best-before date as drivers.
The toll system means that it is actually quite difficult to drive the wrong way on to a French motorway.
Interchanges, service stations and rest areas are the more likely breeding grounds for wrong-way drivers and the last theory I saw concerning Sunday night's crash suggested that he had stopped at an aire or in an emergency lane and managed to depart in the opposite direction. Whether alcohol or drugs played any part, I do not yet know.
But I am glad to report a more optimistic detail.
Of those 80 contresens a year, in the Var alone, half the vehicles are stopped before they can cause any problems. Only five to seven accidents result, and most of them lead only to material damage, not loss of life or injury.
Sadly, that does not help the two fortysomethings killed the other night.
But it may reassure people planning on motoring holidays in these parts this summer, while also reminding them of the existence of an exceptional risk.
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