Day 1 - Snodland, England to St Omer, France

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So, Day 1. We started out in Somerset the day before, where we had to get everyone, and all our stuff, into a 15 year old 3 door car. 3 guys, 1 weeks plus worth of clothes and then some random essentials. We soon realised that not everything would fit into the boot. No problem! 5 seats mean we could pile stuff onto the seat behind the driver. Later on into the trip, this became a bad idea, more on that later! Next stop was Snodland, Kent which was our first stopover before we had to get the morning ferry to Calais.



Next morning (6th September), we noticed we had an oil leak. Being us, we were optimistic and just carried on without worrying. We set off at 10am for the 12pm ferry. It only took us an hour to get there, so no rush. I drove this stretch and I have never driven in the south east before. Boarding the ferry was more straightforward than I thought it would be and soon enough, we were in Calais.



I made the typical mistake when I got off the ferry to drive on the wrong side of the road for about 100 yards before the other two told me to think what I was doing. I haven't made that mistake again - yet. The drive to St Omer, the official start of the Motoscape Rally was a quiet and straightforward one. We arrived at the hotel at about 3 to be greeted with lots and lots of decorated cars. Cars dressed as golf green's, space shuttles etc. We even had an ice cream van turn up, which played loud music and served beer. It's max speed was reported to be 55mph, could it reach that? We'll never know.



After waiting a few hours, we had the only evening meeting of the week, where the organisers set out the basio information we needed to know for the trip. We would have a meeting every morning at 7:45 to get all the details we would need like vignette info, toll info, things to see and do etc. After that, all the teams headed into St Omer for a bite to eat and a drink. We stopped off at a food place next to the Queen Vic, Sensas. This nice little food shop, for €10, gave us a massive portion of chips and a burger (frités). We had this for tea, and then popped into the Queen Vic for a drink. After this, we headed back to the hotel and called it a night.

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