On the road

Sunday- Monday 10-11 Sept 2023

The Hull - Rotterdam ferry is an overnight service that leaves at 20:30. A short 80 mile trip from home is a nice way to start and the next day you disembark at 08:30 local time and hit the motorway.

The trip to Hull wasn’t without mishap, as one of the nice new Lucas retrofit flat wiper blades decided to stay in England by flinging itself off on the M18. Luckily on the Defender, the rear door blade is the same and so I moved that, also a nice new one. That also showed signs of not wanting to go to Albania and I had a difficult session to persuade it otherwise, in the rain at the side of the motorway and again at the services. I must be losing my wiperblade fitting technique.

Check-in at Hull is quick as there’s no customs or Border Force and we we soon driving on the ramp at the stern and onto the freight deck.

At the Sky Lounge there’s a great panoramic view of the Humber and Hull docks and a nice beer helped us settle down into “that holiday mood”.

We wandered around, laughing as we remembered that this seemed to be a big boat, until we saw the Brittany Ferries ones to Spain. Then it was back to the Sky Lounge just as the singer was reaching the climax of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. If this had been a practice for a home Karaoke slot then she might have made the grade but honestly it was excruciating. Never has there been more welcome words to be heard than “I’m going to take a short break now; see you in thirty minutes”.

Next morning the Europort voew was as amazing as ever. What a hive of activity it is.

There was no custom check at Europort either. There was a queue for passports but it was swift and pleasant and we hit the road as far as the first MacDonald’s. Here the coffee machine had failed and the group of Hells bikers that followed us in were not happy.

Back on the road the temperature increased steadily and it became an extremely hot day, maxing at about 35, so quite tricky, especially in slow moving roadworks of which there are plenty in Germany. However we made good progress although it might not look so on the map.

We had a good overnight stop in a small campsite at Schweppenhausen, very close to the A16 (click here) efficiently run of course but marred by finding an oil leak at one of the gearboxes that I thought was fixed after the trip to the French alps. I know there’s a leak, I just can’t find out where it is. So a visit to a garage is planned for the morning. They just don’t know we are coming!