Day 36 - The Long Long Drive Home

I woke up at 5.00am and failed to get back to sleep. I lay in bed and pondered our journey home and where we would stop for the night. There wasn’t a great deal of reasonable priced accommodation in the region of Troyes, which was about 8 hours north of our location. It probably didn’t help that the Tour de France was starting and finishing in Troyes the following day.

Neither of us were relishing the prospect of sleeping in a small double bed in a hotel and not getting much change out of £100 for the privilege. With this in mind, I made the decision to ambitiously try and drive straight home.

At 7.30am, we got up and commenced disassembling our camp for a final time on this trip. It was a better performance than some of our previous attempts. After paying €201 for our seven night stay we drove out of the campsite in the rain at 9.59am.

We typed Calais into our SatNav, which showed the fastest route via toll roads being 739 miles and taking approximately 11 and a half hrs. We didn’t get off to a good start when we were delayed by heavy traffic in and around Sainte-Maxime for 27 minutes.

Jackie checked the channel tunnel train times and discovered that the prices had gone up overnight. She went back to them half an hour later and they had gone up again by about 10%. We panicked and a bought ticket for the 1.20am crossing which was the cheapest and gave us hopefully ample time to make the latest check-in at 00.20am. We were now committed to driving home in one go.

We eventually got onto the A8 toll road. Heavy traffic occasionally brought us to a crawl. Our estimated arrival time in Calais was extending and getting closer to our scheduled departure time on Le Shuttle. If we missed it we would lose the £151 fare and have to buy another ticket.

Luckily we weren’t going in the opposite direction, heading south, where hundreds and hundreds of cars with top boxes, campers and caravans were at a standstill for miles and miles. This was the first day of the French school holidays.

At our first enforced fuel stop we decided to have a KFC. We both fancied a zinger burger, but they didn’t have one. Instead I ordered some spicy burger and Jackie ordered a classic original burger. Both were pretty disgusting.

Just before Lyon we saw a retail park and stopped at a Lidls where we bought 36 bottles of white wine, 6 bottles of red wine and 6 bottles of fizz at a fraction of the price compared to the UK. Our savings on the wine definitely offset the channel crossing fare. Our purchases were technically over our allowance, because you are only allowed 24 bottles of still wine each, but not sparkling wine, where the limit is much less. The car was decidedly much heavier as we chugged back out of the Lidls car park.

The route took us into Lyon alongside the wide Rhône River, where we encountered more heavy traffic and further delays. We were starting to get nervous, because we were was getting to the point where a few more delays would mean that we would definitely miss our channel crossing.

Fortunately for us, the roads emptied north of Lyon and we were able to cruise along averaging 80 - 90 mph, even in torrential rain. We were burning fuel as quickly as Jackie drinks white wine! We had to fill our petrol tank on 3 occasions and pay 4 tolls, totalling around €100.

We listened to the England football match on the radio, which was apparently a slightly better performance than their previous matches. We celebrated the win by having the rest of my leftover pizza for our tea.

We arrived at the Calais Channel Tunnel port at 11.52pm. We checked in and got our car searched by two French Serco security guards. I had to open the boot and our top box to reveal numerous boxes of bottles of wine. God knows what they were looking for because they just peered into both without even looking under anything. We could have had a huge stash of drugs or even a person hidden in the car and they wouldn’t have found it. I got the impression that they had been ordered to go out and search a few vehicles by their boss.

The channel tunnel train was on time and we were soon racing towards home on the left hand side of the road. When we reached Gatwick we went in search of a 24 hour supermarket for milk, bread etc, but all the usual establishments now close at midnight. We were so looking forward to a proper cup of tea and a crumpet, so it wasn’t a happy return for us.

We finally arrived home at 2.57am (3.57am French time) having driven a total of 818 miles, plus at least 10 more for planned and unplanned diversions. The drive home took 17 hours 58 minutes, with a 3 brief stops for fuel and a KFC, then a 2 hour break for the Channel Tunnel. I did ALL the driving, whilst Jackie was in charge of the photography, ensuring the football was on the radio and feeding me sweets!!

This brought our latest road trip of 35 days to an end. We had driven a total of 2,836 miles and spent 31 nights sleeping in our tent (much to Jackie’s dismay), 2 nights in a ferry cabin and just 2 nights in a hotel. We visited 5 countries, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Monaco.

Song of the Day - Drive On by Johnny Cash.Read more