Right, the last full day on tour! Today we’re going to make as much progress up through France as we can, within reason.
It had rained over night but the mud outside the van was still pretty resistant under foot – not like the mud bath that was the volcanic mush in Pompei!
In the past we’ve made the dash up from the south of France all the way home in a day. We’re not that committed these days, and seeing as the French speeding ticket system can reach back to the UK, it’s much more prudent to stick to the actually quite generous 130km/h anyway.
We punched Troyes into the SatNav and set off as it was trying to rain.
And that was pretty much it. The rain held off mostly until about 1:30 when we made our second stop at a service station somewhere around Dijon.
And while we’re talking about those services, one of those bizarre moments happened as we were sitting drinking our take away coffees.
Note the white car left of the red one in this picture, with the lights on…
As we pulled into the space, two spaces to the left of the white car, we noticed there were a couple of Brits sitting in the car having a break.
We then went into the service station, had a wee and negotiated the very posh new automatic coffee machines – it seemed impossible to actually get the cups out of the machine if you ordered an “XL” drink. Fine if you got an espresso!
When we got back to the van to have our drinks, the Brits were still in their car. But after a few minutes we noticed them pull out and we presumed resume their journey.
But then a few seconds later they reappeared into their parking space and the guy got out. He came across to our van and knocked on the window.
We opened the sliding door and he said… “are you John Martin? Purplemeanie?” !!!
Now this does happen to me reasonably regularly in the UK. Obviously at Caterham events, but also can happen randomly in car parks (the latest was in July).
This guy, Mark, had met me at the Caterham and Lotus Seven Club, Intro to Speeding event at Curborough last year. I meet a lot of people at these events, and I remember his face, but it’s fantastic that he took the time to say hello when he saw who we were.
He’d spotted the Purplemeanie sticker on the back of the van.
Doing all this Purplemeanie stuff, and helping out with the club, is a great ice-breaker and fantastic that it means we bump into people all over Europe! 🤣
Perhaps I should get bigger stickers for the van though, perhaps we’re missing friendly encounters! 🤣
After that we stopped once more where we reset our goal for the day. We were going to get to Troyes around 4 and decided we could push on further to Reims. The only site that looked like it was going to be not too far off our route, was open into October and had reasonable reviews was Camping de Val de Vesle about 20km south east of Reims.
Camping de Val de Vesle has also turned out to be the cheapest of all our campsite stops, €14 for a night. That beats the next cheapest which was Faucon in Chareloi, some 8 weeks ago.
So by the time we pitched at the site about 5, we’d put 702km behind us today.
Not bad considering the torrential rain we had during the latter part of the afternoon.
Camping de Val de Vesle is our 31st stop of the trip. Counting campsites (22), hotels (1), friends and family (2), apartments (4), villas (1) and one overnight ferry (not technically a “stop” but the count of nights doesn’t add up unless I count it! 😉). If you’re really unlucky then I’ll do a list of all the places we stayed!
It was also another pretty horrendous peage day. About €80 we think today, and I’m sure more tomorrow…
That’s probably going to put us up around €200 for the peages to get from Naples to Calais. Perhaps we should check the bank account and report back more accurately?
Today’s soundtrack in the van was BBC Sounds. Seeing as we’re heading back to the real world, we bookended the day with R4 AM and PM. And in between we listened to some Toast, Rare Earth and Curious Cases. We also tried David Mitchel’s Unruly on Audible, but grew tired of the ramble he was narrating. It seemed to have lots of factoids, but no real theme pulling it together. We only managed 3 chapters – not recommended if you’re in any way into your history.
As for tomorrow, we’ve now booked the Chunnel for tomorrow at 13:45, €172 in the end. It’s much cheaper on the ferries, but we find the Chunnel worth the extra money. Time, weather etc.
We’re going to try and get away by 8:30 in the morning and that should get us to Calais in plenty of time to find a hypermarche and see what final dent we can make in our stash of Euros!
3928miles on the odometer tonight.
And as if by magic (geddit?) it’s now 19 years later for Harry. If you know, you know… that I’ve managed to finish all 7 books on the final night of the tour. It’s actually been a real comfort to sink into the Potter books and forget the weather or whatever else was going on. And as it happens the perfect length to get me to the end of the trip.
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