The Journey Home

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26-28 May 2008

We made an early start and after a few navigational difficulties finding the local supermarket and then the motorway we started our journey north in earnest. The Swiss border soon arrived, we went through the St Gotthard tunnel and then into Germany. We stayed the night at an excellent camper stop in the town of Speyer which is close to the A61 autobahn between Karlsruhe and Mannheim. There were some other British vans on the site, the first we had seen for over three weeks. Speyer looked a lovely town with a large cathedral and technology museum. We hope to have a look round it some time in the future when we have more time.

Another early get away and after buying some cheap wine in the local Lidl we continued north west through Germany, Holland and Belgium and stopped the night on the French channel coast at the small resort of Bray-Dunes, just east of Dunkerque. Bray-Dunes was very quiet and the municipal campsite closed so it was another night spent on a car park. However we did find a restaurant that was open so were able to enjoy the Moules Frites we had promised ourselves.

There had been a fair amount of news about the French fishermen blocking the channel ports, so we worried that we may have difficulty getting back to England. In the event there was no trouble and we actually caught a ferry earlier than the one we had booked. We arrived back home at about 3.30 in the pouring rain and it was cold enough for us to need to put the central heating on!

Unfortunately, I accidentally reset the trip recorder when we were still in Southern Italy so I don’t know the exact mileage we did, but I think it was about 5,500. For those who are interested, throughout the trip, we were able to get some but not always all of the Brithish TV channels using our Maxview dish and the southern beam for most of the time we were in Italy.

Those who have read this blog will have appreciated the large variety of towns, cities, ancient monuments and natural features there are to explore in Italy, but the lasting impression for us will be the friendliness and helpfulness of the people. As an example, on two occasions women went out of their way to lead us in their cars to campsites we were having difficulty finding.

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