day2

Day 2 – the day the adventure begins .
Up at 6am after a very cold night trying to keep warm whilst listening to the joy that is John’s snoring. After many cups of coffee, we eventually got packed up and ready to set off – Channel tunnel here we come……..Not! Our dear Betty the Bongo let us down with a completely flat battery. Half an hour of panic ensued with Bev phoning to change the Tunnel crossing, John phoning the AA – the panic stopped as suddenly as it had begun with a very nice man from the campsite arriving with a small tractor and industrial jump leads. Not an auspicious start, but things could only get better right? Wrong
On to the tunnel which was actually quite exciting whilst we were getting on and then 35 minutes of sheer boredom – cos u cannot actually see anything – arrived in Calais and started the long drive to the first campsite. On we went through France, Belgium, Holland and into Aachen – in Germany, ready for a nice sit down and some tea. Confident that we would be chilling out with a beer in half an hour, we got out the directions from the campsites website and proceeded. After about 2 hours of driving round, cursing, swearing and screwing the instructions into a ball we found salvation -…..McDonalds, two gleaming golden arches in our hour of need. We had our chicken burgers (which came with some strange sauercrout dressing and got directions in german from the very nice lady at the cake counter – 2 more hours later and several stops to ask people where the campsite was we arrived at long last at 11.15 in the pitch dark – only to discover that the only places left to park were on a stony car park so, by the lights of the two cars and much more swearing we eventually managed to pitch the tents by tying one end to the camper and the other end to the trailer we rolled into bed at 12.30am exhausted and wondering were we really doing this for fun?