Apologies for the slight delay in the next couple of posts - the hotel we've been staying at doesn't have free wifi (and I was being too tight to pay for it...)
So, day 4 was a driving day, so no rollercoasters.
After a leisurely breakfast at the hotel, we returned to our room to pack our bags. Or at least, to remember what was meant to go into each of the umpteen bags we'd ended up with. Somehow I'd already got two carrier bags of dirty laundry (I did say I didn't travel light!)
After checkout we drove across to the Val d'Europe shopping mall. We had a quick amble around the designer outlet village, gawping at the price tags and giggling at the queue to get into Gucci, then made our way to the supermarket Auchan, to do what we'd actually planned - buy some food for lunch that day.
With a 475km drive ahead of us, we'd considered it prudent to make sure we had plenty of supplies, and wouldn't need to spend a fortune in expensive motorway service station restaurants. Thus we came out loaded with a fresh baguette, some very nice French cheese, a pack of ham and some cakes, as well as some paper plates to eat it with. Since we were getting through a lot of it in the nice weather, we also grabbed some cases of bottled water to keep us hydrated!
We'd "borrowed" a knife and some butter from the breakfast buffet - well, we thought we'd better get our money's worth! We stopped at a nice little Aire on the autoroute, just east of Reims, and made made ourselves some sandwiches. Lovely. It was at this point I discovered that the jelly babies I'd brought from England had melted in the car and were now one large lump of multicoloured mess. Ah well, you win some...
After the stop RJ took over driving duties and I got to sit back and enjoy the scenery of north-eastern France. Or rather, look at some cows. The motorway went up and down a series of identical-looking hills, which got through a lot more fuel than the flatter drive from Calais had. A hundred kilometres or so from Strasbourg (our crossing point into Germany) we pulled in for fuel and I took over once again.
This is gripping stuff, isn't it?
We hit Strasbourg around 5pm so it was busy on the roads, though generally moving. Google Maps, which was acting as our sat nav, took us through the town as it considered it a quicker and more direct route than the motorway. After a small amount of city driving it dropped us out onto a nice rural main road into Germany, and eventually into the village just outside Offenburg where we were due to stay for the next two nights.
The hotel itself was charming - a wooden beamed old coaching inn type place, built around a courtyard which was now its biergarten. Our room was on the first floor overlooking the high street (and to RJ's dismay, within earshot of the bells of the clock tower!) It was a decent size, with a double bedstead fitted with two single mattresses and two single duvets, a large wardrobe, a couple of bedside tables and some chairs. The bathroom was cosy but featured a decently powerful shower. My only worry was that it was very warm in there, though we were provided with a fan, which was on pretty much the entire time we spent in the room.
We took dinner in the hotel's restaurant, sitting outside in the biergarten as the weather was still very warm and pleasant. RJ ordered a pork schnitzel with farmhouse bread and chips, while I ordered the veal schnitzel with chips. I'd ordered a large portion and discovered that that just meant double, so was given a plate with two of them. Both of our portions of chips came with a mysterious gravy type substance which was slightly sweet - the closest thing I can compare it to is a red wine sauce you sometimes get with steak. The food was good, and very filling. Afterwards we had to pretty much roll ourselves back up to bed!
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