It was the big day today - the start of the trip. I have to admit that I was equally excited and nervous. Despite the prospect of visiting a lot of theme parks and riding a lot of rollercoasters, it was also the first time I'd be looking after my own holiday plans, driving in foreign countries on the wrong side of the road in a UK spec car, and having to deal with lots of situations where I couldn't guarantee there'd be someone there I understood or could communicate with!
But mostly excitement.
The day began with a 7am alarm - I'd planned to snooze til 7.30 but there was too much to and the excitement/nerves had already got the adrenaline buzzing. After a quick shower I finished packing the few bits I couldn't do the night before (shaver, toiletries, etc) and got everything stacked up in the hall ready to go. I brought the car round to the front of the flats so that I could give it the world's quickest car wash before leaving. A bucket of soapy water, a sponge, a bucket of clean water and a cloth were quickly swizzed over it and it emerged, if not gleaming, at least a little less dusty than before, and certainly easier to see out of the windows.
When RJ arrived it turned out that between the two of us we'd packed quite a lot of stuff. Most of the blame lay at my door - not only had I put together a small suitcase with clothes for the next 2-3 days, I'd also got a larger one with clothes for the rest of the trip, plus a holdall with "just in case" stuff like raincoats and hoodies for if the weather turned. Then there's the general supplies (bottles of water, snacks for the car) and creature comforts (laptop, the assortment of chargers you seem to need to cart around everywhere these days). The boot of my Fiesta ended up not being quite big enough so after a quick think we had to lower the back seats and rejig the packing.
Saturday mornings seem to be a relatively quiet time on the roads - we had no problem getting through the Blackwall Tunnel and out of London, and the A2/M2 route to Dover was also nice and clear. So clear, in fact, that we arrived in Dover nearly 2 hours before our sailing, so had time to kill. A local Tesco provided us with toilets, as well as some crisps and window wipes (whatever turns you on) to keep us going for the journey.
Onwards to the port, we had a short queue for French border control where a grumpy woman took our passports, shut her kiosk's window and then carried on eating her croissant for a few minutes before handing them back (the passports, not the croissants) and waving us on. British border control weren't interested in the slightest and just waved us through. Customs was deserted - it seems nobody really cares what you might be bringing out of the UK. At check-in we were assigned our lane number and headed round to the holding pen to await our sailing.
At this point I decided it'd be a good idea to do the things we needed to make the car legal abroad. The GB sticker was a minor challenge (it turns out the back of a modern Fiesta doesn't have flat surfaces of an adequate size for it, so we had to improvise a bit) but the harder thing turned out to be the headlight adjusters. The instructions told us to place them partially over the projector lenses, which wasn't helpful as the headlights are a sealed unit with a smooth transparent cover that encompasses all the lights. A friendly German in a neighbouring vehicle tried to help but in the bright Dover sunshine we couldn't quite work it out, so decided to leave it until a point at which we actually needed to travel in the dark, and could see what effect the stickers would have.
The ferry crossing was uneventful - we grabbed lunch in the self-service restaurant the way we'd always done on family trips of my childhood. The fish and "chips" were acceptable, the treacle pudding tasty but lukewarm, and the whole meal was slightly better than I expected, which may hint at how low my expectations were to begin with. We did the customary wander through Duty Free, where I continued my habit of trying out testers of aftershaves and deciding they all smell the same, then went out on deck for the "bracing" sea air. Or indeed, to experience the warm but strong wind of the channel.
Arriving in France, I had my first taste of driving on the continent, and it was nowhere near as bad as I'd imagined. From family trips in the past I was already used to the French road signage and markings, so it was just a case of remembering to be in the correct lane and we were good to go. The autoroutes were relatively quiet, my phone worked nicely as a Sat Nav, and we only had to make one rest stop on the way down towards Paris.
Our hotel for the night is about 7km from our first park of the trip, Parc Asterix. I'd wanted to visit this place since we used to pass it on every trip to my grandparents' place when they lived near Paris. It also helped that I devoured the Asterix comic books as a child, though while some of the names tickled me at the time (Unhygienix the fishmonger, Cacofonix the bard) there were others I'd have to wait til I was older to understand (Getafix the druid, for one). So our stop for the night is in a rather basic budget hotel on an out-of-town "hotel zone" near Saint-Witz, which seems to contain nothing but hotels and restaurants.
We compared reviews of the local restaurants (often using Google Translate, which made it a lot more interesting). The Buffalo Grill was described by several customers as "worse than McDonald's", there was some bizarre "Sushi Grill" place which looked like the sort of building where murders happen in American dramas (and the reviews weren't much better). In the end we plumped for the Del Arte pizza/pasta restaurant next door to the hotel, as the only negative reviews we read were that the service might sometimes be a bit slow.
It was basically a Pizza Express type place, with a decent menu offering pizza and pasta dishes. The service was good, we had an attentive young chap who seemed disappointed that neither of us followed football (he asked if we preferred Manchester United or Manchester City - when we said neither he admitted he was a Barcelona fan). RJ ordered a margerita pizza and I had the linguine carbonara. We were both more than happy with the food quality and the price (it came to €24 for both of us having a main course and a soft drink).
Back at the hotel we're now turning in for an early night before tomorrow's first park adventure. Having driven past it earlier we saw the lift hill of Osiris poking up alongside the motorway, and that looks like a lot of fun!
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