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.