Traffic stop

Driving home this afternoon, several cars coming the other way flashed their lights at me, so I slowed down to 50 kph and looked for the radar trap. It turned out that the gendarmes had set up a document checkpoint around the corner and I was duly pulled over. My vehicle licence and insurance certificate were in order, and my foreign driving licence provided only a minor diversion. My headlights were scrutinised (although I was not asked to turn them on), but the cracked windscreen was ignored. I was thanked and told to move on. The gendarme didn't ask to see my passport (which I had left at home) and he didn't ask to see the reflective waistcoat that should be carried in the car from the first of this year.

The increasingly common random traffic stops on rural roads are a frequent topic of conversation here. It seems that the dreaded breathalyzer is rarely brought out, but the threat is there.