Glasgow to Dover - One man, a woman and a gold renault clio

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On a Cold, windy morning in January, we start loading charlie the clio with all our wordly possessions for our last road trip to Dover, across France and onto our final destination of Spain! I’ve decided to take charge of the tetris-style car packing so everything fits in properly (and I don’t trust Greg to do it) as at this moment I am slightly concerned how optimistic we are about how much a Renault clio can hold. It’s all going quite well until it starts torrentially raining (with a sprinkle of hailstones chucked in for good measure) meaning I get completely soaked – I’m sooooo glad I bothered to straighten my hair this morning. Lo and behold as soon as I finish packing the car, the rain stops. Weather 1, Nikki 0.

Apparently our friends have been taking bets on how long it will be before we have our first argument, and some of you may be wondering when I’ll slip it into the story. Will we argue over which services to stop at? Will Greg get annoyed at my lack of geographical knowledge and map reading skills? Or will we argue over a bowl of tomato soup before we’ve even left the house? If you guessed number three then you would be totally correct and it ends with Greg telling me to "shut the f@£# up" (don’t ask why or what). Thankfully we make up again before we leave which means at least we will be talking to each other the whole journey instead of waiting until we got to England like last time….

It does take us a little bit longer than planned to get organised (we’re always the same and it doesn’t help Greg faffs around doing silly little last minute things like check he has put the taps off even though we haven’t even been using them) but thankfully this time I have guestimated this would probably happen so have made allowances for it. By midday we're off and we make good progress until we hit rush hour traffic at Birmingham. Every single time we go this way we choose to avoid the toll road which has a £2.80 fee meaning we get stuck in traffic for ages. Why do we never learn??? Why do we feel the need to save £2.80??? The result is we only manage to go about 3 miles in an hour. Maybe one day we’ll learn.

By 8.30pm we've made it to the outskirts of north London so we figure we've only got another hour or so to go to reach Dover, but in reality it's another 2 hours. This messes up our plans for dinner as we had planned to eat in the hotel but realise too late we won’t make it in time. And of course Greg had pretty much already finished our pile of homemade sandwiches by the time we passed Chorley. We keep our eyes peeled for somewhere to eat along our route and soon spot a sign for services called ‘stop24’. It sounds promising but turns out to be a closed service station with only the toilets still open. It's a bit misleading and should really be called pee24 (or ‘takingthepiss24?’).

The weather has once again turned wet and windy and we're tired and hungry so the last 30 minutes of our journey are never ending and feels like driving to Dover from Glasgow all over again. Eventually and thankfully we make it to the hotel for just after around 10.30pm. We seem to be on a role with this whole hotel malarkey as the hotel we’ve booked is really nice and our room even has 2 seperate double beds in it - they must have known we were coming 😉. It also has an enticing looking bath, so after a quick stop off to McDonald's for a chicken salad (the server must have been surprised at two Glaswegians ordering something so healthy when in reality it's the only thing on the menu without gluten in it) I dive into a nice hot bath to relax whilst Greg watches football.

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