5 September 2022 – Nous sommes arrivés!

Miles driven today = 65

Total Miles to date = 178

Lisa and I both had a rather fitful night's sleep last night.  The aire in Canterbury was quiet and peaceful enough but at 2:30am we had a short but very intense downpour which woke us from our slumbers.  We quickly battened down the hatches but struggled to get back off to sleep again so we were up just after 6 and at the Eurostar terminal a full 2 hours before our scheduled 10:20 departure.  We were allocated a slot on an earlier train but after gas checks and sitting in a stationary queue for what seemed like hours we ultimately ended up leaving on our originally booked train.

We bought our one way ticket on the Le Shuttle way back in April.  Back then it cost £144 but you can redeem Tesco vouchers at three times face value, so effectively it’s only cost us £45 worth of those plus a measly £9 in cash.  Our date, embarkation point and means of returning home are still very much to be decided at a later date, because that's how we roll.

I’ve only ever travelled through the Channel Tunnel once before and that was on a business trip to Paris more than a decade ago.  This was my first experience of actually travelling through the Tunnel in a vehicle and it really was quite surreal letting the train take the strain in every sense.  I actually phoned my Mum just to be able to tell her I was calling her from under the sea.  I'm not certain she entirely grasped the concept.

Officially we aren’t allowed to bring any meat or dairy into France (although nobody checked the contents of our fridge) and we left home with little more than the bare essentials.  So, having reset our watches forwards an hour, our first job was to make a stop at the Lidl close to the Eurotunnel terminal in order to top up with a few bits and bobs for the next couple of nights' tea.  I know you are fully well aware of what Lidl looks like but in true blogger fashion, here's a photo anyway!

We were surprised to find that basics like fresh milk and a lot of common vegetables were nowhere to be seen but we did help ourselves to some very tempting looking white anchovies and wine was as little as €2.29 a bottle so we will just have to make do with beaujolais on our cornflakes for a few days.

I know that on the introductory page for this tour I said that we are initially planning to head south through France fairly rapidly, but that doesn’t mean that we are going to jump straight on the motorway and burn down to the Spanish border in a couple of days.  We’ve made ourselves a bit of an unwritten rule that we will avoid toll roads wherever feasibly possible on this trip.  This isn’t so much for economic reasons.  We are very well aware that we will use considerably more diesel by taking the back roads, but we are more likely to stumble across points of interest and get far more of a flavour of the regions we are travelling through than we would if we were covering several hundred miles of characterless tarmac every day.

So we have ticked the “avoid tolls” box on the sat nav and we will see where this takes us.  Initially we jumped on the non-toll section of the A16 to get us away from Calais.  This quickly whisked us down to the south of Boulogne, where we picked up the D940 to Étaples and on to our planned overnight stopover at a free aire in the low-key seaside resort town of Stella Plage. 

Highlight of the journey was spotting a gentleman we named the Biking Viking.  I kid you not, a mature gentleman with a huge beard and horned helmet on a bicycle.

Unfortunately when we got to Stella Plage all 30 allocated spaces at the aire were already chocablock full so we have moved a few kilometres inland to the Camping Club de la Mer in the next town of Merlimont.

The campsite is a fairly large site with a big pool area, which I was planning on trying out when it was hot and humid earlier on but it's since been chucking down with rain so we will probably skip it.  At €24.50 without hook up it's very much at the top end of what we are prepared to pay on this trip but we'd had enough of driving for one day so we said "oui" and parked ourselves up.

We went for a stroll along a forest trail which also doubles up as a golf frisbee / assault course.  The full trail in total is getting on for 10km long and we had only really completed the first section before we noticed some ominously black clouds approaching, so we scuttled back to the van just in time to avoid getting drenched.  At least we got to stretch our legs.

I'm not sure if the French are into their sloe gin but if they are then it looks like it'll be a bumper harvest this year.

Tomorrow we head for Rouen.

6 September 2022 - Rouen