Good to be back

Well its goodbye England

And Bonjour La France.

We did think about doing all our posts in French whilst we were in France but the thought didn’t last too long and we decided on English.

The day starts off with an early start from Kent, sorry Ann and Kev. We manage to get on an earlier ferry than the one we had booked so following our last healthy English breakfast which would have been much better if it was warm mind you at least we had French style coffee which is a hundred times better than the coloured sock water you get served in most English eateries.

On arrival in Calais things hadn’t changed in the four years since we were last there, people still drive on the wrong side of the road and you still can’t buy anything on a Sunday, the latter could be seen as a plus because everybody needs a rest from the daily grind. However if you’ve been living in consumer led England for the last few years where everybody has the human right to buy a tin of spaghetti hoops 24/7 if they want one, everything being closed can be a tad irratating. Now, we needed fuel - which isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, after driving twice round Calais to the sound of our English speaking sat nav voice trying to negotiate tricky sounding French street names with a very bizarre accent we decided to leave the port town and head south towards Gay Paree. 1 euro 26 per litre we ended up paying in a service station out of town as opposed to the 1 euro 15 in all the closed supermarche filling stations.

Following an uneventful traverse of the Periphique we head south, the plan was for this to be a driving day and to put as much land between us and the channel as we could. Finally pulling up at 8:30 pm in an aire de pique-nique called “Aire de Bouble” (yes it really was) between junctions 11 and 12 on the A71 just north of Clermont- Ferrand, we feed on pizza and get some sleep.