Scout a French Road Trip in Flight Simulator Before You Drive

The first time I drove the Route des Crêtes above the Gorges du Verdon, I did it in the wrong direction, at the wrong hour, with a car that was too wide for how nervous I was. The sun sat low over the canyon rim and straight into the windscreen. My partner counted the lookouts out loud so I would stop trying to look at them myself. We finished the loop, ate a very late lunch in La Palud-sur-Verdon and agreed we had seen almost nothing.

The second time, two years later, I had already "flown" the route at my desk in Microsoft Flight Simulator the week before. I knew which way the road climbed, which belvederes faced west, and roughly where the sheer drops sat on the passenger side. It changed the whole day. This piece is about what a flight or driving sim can honestly tell you about a French road trip before you go, and the handful of things it will cheerfully get wrong.

Why a game, and not just a map

A paper Michelin map tells you a road is twisty. Satellite view tells you where it goes. Neither tells you how it feels to come over a crest and see the drop open up on your right. A flight sim sits in between: real terrain height, real aerial imagery draped over it, and a camera you can park a few hundred metres above the road and drag along at whatever speed you like.

Flight Simulator has used Bing aerial imagery and elevation data since its 2020 release, and France got extra attention in a 2021 world update that added hand-built landmarks and sharper photogrammetry around a few cities. In rural Provence the villages are still mostly generic buildings dropped onto the real footprint, but the land itself is right. For a road like the D23, which is entirely about the land, that is the part you need.

What I actually check before a drive

I give each route about forty minutes in the sim, usually the Sunday before. I set the time of day and the date to match the trip, because the single most useful thing the sim tells you is where the light will be. Then I go through the same short list.

1. Direction of travel. On a loop, pick the direction that puts the drop on the passenger side if the driver is anxious about edges, or on the driver's side if the driver wants the view. On the Route des Crêtes the canyon sits south of the road, so the direction you choose decides who gets the view, and a stretch of the loop is signed one way, which the sim will not tell you.
2. Sun angle at the hour you will be there. I set the clock to 16:30 in late September and watched the west-facing lookouts turn gold. That is where we stopped the second time.
3. Where the villages actually sit. Moustiers-Sainte-Marie is tucked into a cleft in the cliff, which explains why parking is tight and why the walk up from the lower lots is steeper than it looks on a map.
4. Gradient and switchbacks. Hover low over the hairpins and you can count them. On the climb from the Lac de Sainte-Croix toward Moustiers I counted eleven tight ones, which told me to plan a coffee stop at the top instead of the bottom.
5. Bail-out roads. If the weather turns, where can you leave the route? The sim makes the side valleys obvious in a way a road map does not.

None of this takes skill as a pilot. I leave the plane on autopilot or use the drone camera and never land anywhere.

What the sim gets wrong, and it matters

I would be lying if I said the preview is reliable for everything. Some of the gaps are cosmetic and some can ruin an afternoon.

Road width is the big one. Aerial imagery shows a grey line through the trees; it does not tell you that a section is a single lane with a rock wall on one side and a low parapet on the other, or that you will reverse 40 metres to let a camper van past. I have found Street View better for that, where it exists, and on the smallest departmental roads it often does not.

Seasonal closures do not exist in the game. Parts of the Route des Crêtes usually close over the winter, and mountain passes further east open late. The sim will let you fly over a road that has been shut since November. Always check the département's road information page the week you travel.

Villages look wrong. The software fills them with stock houses, so the honey-coloured stone and the faience workshops of Moustiers are absent. Do not judge whether a village is worth stopping in from the sim. Judge only how to get in and out of it.

Scale tricks you in driving games specifically. Euro Truck Simulator 2's France expansion is a lovely way to learn how autoroutes, péages and aires fit together, but the world is heavily compressed, with distances between cities shrunk to a small fraction of the real thing. A drive that takes twenty minutes in the game can take a full morning in reality. Use it for the shape of a route, never for timing.

The game shows you the land. The département shows you whether you are allowed on it. The village shows you whether it was worth the trip.

A different use: picking where to sleep

The part I did not expect to find useful was choosing an inn. Once you have flown a valley, you know which villages sit in the sun at breakfast and which ones spend the morning in the shadow of a ridge. In a gorge country that is a real difference in October. It also shows you how far a given auberge is from the route's best stretch in real terrain, not in straight-line kilometres. A place 9 km away across a canyon can be a 35 minute drive around it.

When I plan stays now I pick the stretch of road first, then look for family run inns worth seeking out within a short, flat drive of it. For a slower pace in gentler country, my notes from a slow road trip through Burgundy cover the same approach on smaller hills.

Try it on one road this week

Pick a single road from a trip you are already planning, ideally one stretch of under 30 km, and spend forty minutes with it in any flight sim or even a free 3D globe. Set the date and hour you will actually be there. Write down three things: which direction you will drive it, where the light will be best, and one place you can leave the route if you need to. Then check the official road status for closures. That small note will do more for the day than any list of top viewpoints, and if you enjoy the virtual side, there is more on how road trip games mirror a relaxed drive through France.