High in the South of France

But first we made a slight detour. My wife and son -- who had picked up a tourist brochure at our hotel -- were convinced that we had to visit the Micropolis, which bills itself as the "City of Insects," in the village of Saint-Leons.

I expected to find one of those cheap, disappointing tourist traps you generally find anywhere in the middle of nowhere on this planet. Instead what we found was one of the best-conceived and -executed oddball-niche exhibits I've ever visited. I'm not an insect lover, but I was disappointed that we arrived just one hour before closing time.

The Micropolis sits at the edge of pastoral Saint-Leons -- significantly, the birthplace (in 1823) of French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. The Micropolis is housed in a series of modern structures built into the hillside like an ant colony, with a series of gardens and outdoor interactive sculpture exhibits spread over the surrounding grounds. The moment we passed the terrace with the Micropolis's restaurant/cafe, with a slick, fully stocked bar and big, gleaming espresso machine, my skepticism melted away. This, I could tell, was a class operation.

As for the exhibit hall itself, it was even better thought-out than the bar -- a painstakingly Gallic, detailed exploration of the insect world: beautiful, logically plotted, inventive, informative and, in a word, cool, with a series of exotic specimen displays, interactive exhibits, films and fantastic human-insect sculptures.

Another trip to the gift shop, another small wad of euros gone, and we set out toward the bridge in the orange evening light.

As we rolled down the A75 after paying the $7.35 toll, we noticed how the path was designed for dramatic effect. The roadway winds to the left, then banks down to the right to create a brilliant vantage. "Look at me," the bridge seems to be calling.

There is a rest stop just before the bridge deck, with an old farm that was in the process of being transformed into a deluxe visitors center. I got out of the car (by this time the rest of the family was pooped and stayed behind) and climbed a ridge and a set of stairs carved into a hillside, arriving at a stone lookout with a view over the steel towers and the viaduct.

This is one of those spots where people stare at their surroundings and feel profoundly reassured that they have arrived at a significant place. Just as if they are looking on the great pyramids, they take out their cameras and pass them around to engrave their images, reflexively joining a part of themselves forever with their surroundings.

I got back in the car and drove on the smooth blacktop toward the towers of white steel and taut cables, staying in the slower of the two lanes to savor the moment. There came a point when the horizon stretched in every direction, and we sensed we were floating through the center of France.

No one said it, but we felt the same thing: "Whooooooooa."

Robert V. Camuto last wrote for Travel about walking a portion of the Way of St. James in rural France.