Long story short is that we have sold our lovely boat, Nimrod, (who has her own blog btw) so we need to clear our personal stuff off her. This would be easy apart from the fact that she is in a boatyard near Athens, some 2,000 miles away! So, on Sunday we left in Dora to drive down to Folkestone as we had a booking on Le Shuttle to Calais for Monday morning. We had found a park up for the night at The Master Brewer only 15 minutes from the tunnel terminal. Perfect. They were celebrating St Patrick’s Day so when we arrived at 18.30 hours quite a few of their customers had clearly been celebrating since lunchtime. No food as they only serve Sunday lunch but that was fine as we had a chicken tagine left over to heat up. A quick drink in the pub as a thank you and then back to the van to actually do some planning! We reckoned it would take us about 5 days to get to Greece via Italy with long driving days on toll motorways but then,once we had sorted the boat out, we would meander our way back through Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Belgium and France. At least, that’s the plan.

The pub car park was remarkably quiet after about 22.00 hours so we managed to get some sleep. We were both awake by 07.00 and at the terminal before 07.30 which meant we could then have breakfast before boarding the train.

The train was running about 30 minutes late but that didn’t delay us too much on our 500 mile journey from Calais.

A steady but fairly boring drive down the motorways towards Geneva. We even managed to find a motorway service station with a half decent price for diesel! Stopped around 13.00 hours to have lunch at one of the many Aires on the motorway. Although basic, it had toilets, bins and a bit of green space to have a short break. We could learn a lot about creating such rest stops on our motorways.

We continued on our journey listening to podcasts and audio books until we turned off the motorway onto the N5 to take us over the Jura mountain range towards Ornex. It would have been glorious in daylight but dusk had already settled over the mountain. Luckily, very little snow was evident as this was snow chain country in winter and our snow socks are a phaff to put on Dora. We arrived at our friend’s house around 20.00 hours, quite tired from our day but feeling accomplished. A late supper and catch up before retiring to sleep in Dora (on their drive).

Total miles driven: 573

Tolls: €95