No tolls
Driving from Paris down to Marseille on the motorway costs close to seventy euros in tolls, before you even count the fuel. The routes Ombra suggests ask for none, and that holds from the first mile to the last.
Running in France
Slower. Cheaper.
Far more interesting.
Ombra takes you along the back roads, with no motorway and no tolls, and fits real breaks into the trip: at the hour you want to stop, with what you need on site, and in the shade when the thermometer climbs. You burn less fuel, you drive through villages, and you arrive a little later.
Free, and no account needed: a trip is planned without creating anything. An account only serves to find your previous ones.
7h 40 · 388 km
toll-free · 2 stops · Tuesday 11 August
Mostly secondary roads · 61%
- Secondary road61%
- Main road27%
- Local road12%
About €35 of fuel, and not a penny of toll
Per kilometre, this trip comes to €0.09. By tolled motorway, the same kilometre costs €0.21 — €0.11 of fuel, plus €0.10 of toll.
Estimated for a petrol city car, at €1.75 a litre and €0.10 per motorway kilometre. Fixed prices, taken in August 2026: a plan reopened six weeks from now shows the same figure.
- Start
3h 15 · 200 km
Lunch0.82
Croix-Blanche rest area
- 45 min, until
- + 6 min
- Table
- Toilets
- Water
Shade84%Reliable estimate
2h 05 · 128 km
Coffee break0.74
Le Café de la Halle
- 25 min, until
- + 4 min
- Café
- Toilets
Shade71%Moderately reliable
1h 10 · 60 km
- Destination
A sat nav saves you twenty minutes. It doesn’t tell you where to have lunch.
So you pull into the first service station going, at 13:40, because it was the next one. The table is in full sun, the toilets are closed, and the village you wanted to see was three exits back.
It isn’t the miles that a journey lacks. It’s the stops, and everything you drive past without ever pulling over.
Why leave the motorway
What the back road gives you back.
A tank that lasts longer
At 110 km/h rather than 130, a car already burns a fifth less; at 80, the gap widens further. And the detour isn’t always the one you expect: on our first Auvergne trips, the motorway-free road was more often the shorter one — the motorway goes around what the back road goes through.
Villages, not service stations
The motorway was laid out to avoid what the road goes through. Six minutes of detour is often enough to swap a junction car park for a village square, with its market hall, its plane trees and its bell tower.
Something to eat where you stop
A bakery open at nine, a market in the morning, an inn serving the local dish. Ombra takes real opening hours into account, so it only offers you what will be open when you pass through.
An hour more, a day gained
It takes longer, and we may as well say so: roughly an hour in eight, and more where the motorway runs straight while the road has to work its way around a mountain. But you would have stopped anyway, and those stops are often worth more than the drive they interrupt.
And shade at midday
A table in full August sun is no use to anyone. Ombra works out where the shade will fall at the hour you arrive — a calculation no other service bothers with — and tells you plainly when it doesn’t know.
How the stops are chosen
Three sentences are enough to describe a journey.
You say when
“A lunch break around 12:30, a coffee around 4.” You give hours and what you need on site, rather than points on a map.
Ombra searches along the road
For each break, Ombra goes through the places you could reach within the window you asked for, and measures what each one would really cost you in minutes of detour.
You get a plan, and its reasons
You get the times, the amenities at each stop and the shade expected there. And if you want to know why this one rather than another, the answer is there too.
Explainability
Every stop comes with its reasons.
Nothing is decided behind the scenes. Each stop gets a score, made of criteria you can read one by one: the detour, the shade, the arrival time, the amenities, how quiet the place is. And you can compare it with any place that was ruled out.
“The Pont-de-Dore rest area beats the Vollore-Ville stop mainly on shade: 0.84 against 0.31 — twelve trees within 25 m, sun at 41° to the south-west.”
No paid placement
No business can buy its way up the list.
A restaurant can tell us its opening hours, fill in its entry, offer a discount to travellers passing through. That earns it a better entry — and you will see it written — but never a better place.
When the time comes to choose your stops, Ombra simply doesn’t know which ones are run by a partner. That is what lets us explain every choice to you without having to keep anything quiet.
All of France, and nothing beyond.
Ombra works today in France, and nowhere else. That isn’t a commercial choice: the engine only knows the roads and places on the map it was given, and a trip that leaves it is refused rather than badly worked out. We would rather tell you no than send you to lunch in front of a closed door.
Five hundred thousand possible stops are listed there, from Brittany to Provence: shaded tables, rest areas, bakeries, toilets. Leave your address and we will let you know what opens next.