12 February
2025 – A Predictable Start
Miles
driven today = 111
Total Miles
to date = 111
Our primary
abode these days is the home Lisa owns in the Yorkshire Pennines, but for the
time being at least, I still have my house in Suffolk where we store a lot of
our gear when it’s not in use. So we
made our way down the A1 at the weekend in order to give ourselves a few days
to make our final preparations and to spend a bit of time with my Mum and some
of our friends before we head off on our adventures.
The van
also has a new home about 30 minutes from our Yorkshire house. It’s pricy but
there was nothing else available locally when our contract at the previous Suffolk
depot expired while we were in Italy last year. However she is on hard-standing, so there
are no sinking issues like we had at the previous place when the ground got
boggy, the security is “platinum” rated and we also have the benefit of the
facility doubling up as an energy supplier with dirt cheap LPG readily available,
so we made sure our tanks were fully topped up before we headed South. Likewise with Ad-Blu so we don’t have to
worry about that for the first couple of thousand miles of the trip.
So with
everything stowed, diesel replenished, water tank filled and the trip counter
reset to zero, we got ourselves underway just after lunch.
Our journey down the A12, over the QE Bridge
and along the M2, was grey but otherwise uneventful and we are now parked up at
our familiar jumping off point for Le Shuttle in the motorhome aire at the New
Dover Road Park & Ride facility on the outskirts of Canterbury.
It’s still
just £8 a night to stay here. I really
wish more towns in the UK would take a leaf out of Canterbury’s book in making
facilities like this more widely available rather than just sticking up height
barriers and “No overnight parking” signs everywhere and generally treating
motorhomers like social pariahs.
This
massive Concorde, “Bertie Bus”, is our next door neighbour for tonight.
They have their own Youtube channel if you
fancy having a look around the interior and check out where they have been on
their adventures.
We busied
ourselves with making up the bed and doing the final few bits of stowing before
making our way round the corner to the Old Gate Inn for our now traditional
last supper on British soil.
I’m
guessing they might have changed their chef since last year.
We’ve always found the food here to be decent pub
grub fare but we were both mightily impressed with our choice of the belly
pork which made for a superb early Valentines Day nosh before an early night
ready for our appointment in the morning with Le Shuttle.
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