On the Road Again!

We cancelled the trip that would have taken us to the Cathargo Malibu factory at Aulendorf mostly due to the possible weather and that we have a 16yo dog.  He was really not coping with the overly hot weather in June. No one expected to be 1300m above aea level and it being 36°C!! The email to Eurotunnel wasn't as productive as I had hoped.  We could change the date of travel but... the year you can book in is from when the ticket was bought not from when you are booked to travel. I booked the crossing on January 16th. So if we change the date we'd have to travel before then. It's not that great a deal. Hopefully, the weather will start to revert to normal and we can still go in September.  To cancel would lose us over £300. We will have to source breakdown cover for the van and travel insurance for us and of course, repatriation for Reggie. Where to go? Germany still? Or stay more local in France. I had thought of maybe Alcossebre again!!!! Let'...

After getting back from three weeks in Spain and France where the weather was abnormally hot we decided we can't put our old dog through that anymore. As he has got older he is less happy travelling in the car and in the van. He doesn't settle like he used to and it's unfair on him. Once I can get through to Eurotunnel I can cancel the booking. In the past they haven't refunded the fare but have deferred it as a credit to be used within 12 months. We shall see. It will save us some money as our travel insurance for us and the van ends on August 28th, and we would have needed to renew that. The dog comes before holiday travel. Let's see what the future brings.

For the summer holiday we gave already booked the outward ferry with Brittany Ferries from Plymouth to Santander.  In addition, I have booked a couple of nights in campsite along the coast from the port.  Only for a couple of days to get over the long ferry across the Bay of Biscay. There's still a lot of planning ahead on where to go. Stay in Northern Spain and hoover up the sights there. Maybe cross into Portugal. I know I should embrace the real "van lifer" experience and decide where to go from one day to the next. "Leaving only footprints" etc. But I am one of life's planners. We always have to look ahead to sort out Reggie's worming pill. We have used two vets' practices regularly before. This year though Reggie will need his rabies jab updated. It's due in June and so we need it done before returning to the UK.   I will probably look at the vet in Denderleeuw again. We had him booked in this year, but the terrible weather, several "na...

Day 1.  After some time of avoiding Le Shuttle, we booked again, the first time in Malibu Molly! It's always a toss of the coin whether we go by Le Shuttle or the ferry from Dover. Since we've had Reggie for eleven years we have opted to use the tunnel more, simply when in the car it was easier and the price was comparable with the ferries. Since Covid though, Le Shuttle (train!) prices have climbed and climbed and not kept pace with earnings nor with the ferries. As a Club Le Shuttle member every so often I get offers to save some rather decent percentages off the fare. This year the booking offer would only cover the outward journey to France and though still more than the ferry for the same date it wasn't the usual £100 plus difference. So I booked the outward only.  The return leg would have been around £150 more than either of the Calais to Dover ferries, including access to the pet lounges! I wasn't going to book a return until we were over there to keep our optio...

Once I had rested after my 14 hours sojourn between triage and major investigations, I started to work through the list of bookings I had already made for this trip. Le Shuttle was the easiest and could be done online. That they stiffed us for £36 to change from one low season date to another low season date says more about their business than anything. No humans involved and I did all the work for them. The two Camping-Car Park bookings were easily enough cancelled, although it needed a WhatsApp chat to get it done as it can't be done through the newly updated app on the phone. It needed a Messenger message to their Facebook social media team to get the WhatsApp link.  The cost of the two aires was credited back to my account in minutes. The other campsite bookings took a little longer.  The site in Belgium that I booked through the Caravan Club had been paid in full. Firstly a deposit in January and then the full payment in April.  I am to receive two payments that amou...

Ferry Maybe I should have done this before but I have booked the return crossing for the end of our holiday. I did a price comparison check on the three of the four channel crossing operators from our area.  I discounted DFDS (Calais or Dunkerque) as they don't have anywhere for the dog to go other than in the van for the entire crossing. Further afield is DFDS from Dieppe to Newhaven.  Newhaven is along the A259 almost door to door. One road! That route also doesn't have a dog lounge and the crossing is around 4 hours. So from the three I have booked Irish Ferries. Why?  It's the cheapest.  I paid in euros and it came out at £132.10 when it landed in my Halifax account. This is for the van, us and Reggie with access to the "pet den".   Last year when I returned on the bike from the MotoGP at Assen their ferry "Oscar Wilde" was very clean and was much cheaper than P&O and the Shuttle. By comparison. For ...

After a few days of poring over maps and the internet for routes and overnight stays I have booked the first night of the holiday.  It's in Belgium. I looked on the various sites and the Caravan Club actually came up with the best looking place. The site looks good and is called Ardennen Camping Bertrix. It's about 215 miles from the Eurotunnel arrival area to the site.  I have planned it to be non-toll all the way.  Of course we need to stop for shopping when we get across.  There are plenty of opportunities before we cross the France to Belgium border around the south of Lille.

Booked the ferries. Or rather the crossings. Out on Le Shuttle with Neill and Phil on 27th June at 0820.  We need to be there an hour before but personally I think 90 minutes would be better! We have to get through French passport control to get our Schengen border stamps. Returning 5 days later on the Irish Ferries route from Calais at 1750. It's quite late but I  want to give myself plenty of time to get back to Calais from Assen in one hit and then get through the marvellous disaster known at the UK Passport control. Not to mention the French clowns stamping my Schengen exit! All the holdups courtesy of those that voted leave in 2016 and the useless politicians on both sides that created this mess.

The trouble with planning the first few steps of a trip that's about 150 days away is that it's easy to over think it. Over plan it even. It's also easy to think of somewhere to go and then change your mind. My original thinking was a kind of loop. West from Bilbao and then down through the Picos d'Europa into Portugal and then back across north of Madrid to the Pyrenees and across on one of the passes or tunnels and back through France to the Channel. Two dates are fixed. The ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, and the return Eurotunnel home.  What happens in the middle is all negotiable. My initial searches haven't been very successful in finding camping sites or overnight stops that appeal to me along the northern coast.  May might also be a little too hot for Reggie to venture to the southern coast, the Mediterranean, but Portugal still excites.. As we count down things might become clearer. And we have to get a vet to do Reggie's worming and stamp in his pet p...

Arrived at the Shuttle at 0646 and checked Reggie into the Pet Reception. Our first stop tonight would be a campsite in Bourg-Comin - Camping la Pointe. Only €19 a night inc EHU. Decent site, good pitches. After a stop at the Picard in Coquelles for three kilos of dogador, raw food for dogs,and then Auchun for those essentials for life - food, beer and wine, and we were off. We decided to knock the time off and take the A26. A toll road. The satnav was quoting 4.5 hours and 7.5 off toll With cruise control to be set at 100km/h on the HUD, we set off. The temp gauge showing a reasonable 25°C. A couple of stops for coffee and lunch, plus essential dog pee breaks and we exited near Laon. I had set a waypoint to a motorhome parking area close to the city wall. One road was closed with road works, but the satnav got us round. Park4Night shows the space for 8 motorhomes. The spaces are delimited by metal studs in the road. There was only one Moho there when we arrived. I did a three point tu...

Had a customer review questionaire in my email today from Eurotunnel. It asks about my last journey..... This is my comment: We were held up loading because a car driver refused to go on the upper deck. He was then hard up against the front doors of the last carriage. The motorcycles booked on C5 21/9/22 were crammed in. At Folkestone we had to back up into the entrance way to let this clown reverse to open the doors. This delayed our departure from Calais by 20 minutes and another 15 at Folkestone .  I scored them 4/10.  Absolutely ridiculous. The tw*t should have been told it was upstairs or nothing.