Friday 6 February - to Villedômer

Where's Bertie? He's in the Aire at Villedômer, where he's been several times before.

Weather: Some sunshine, some overcast, some showers. 11-14 degrees.

Last summer, Bertie's windscreen wiper motor twice ceased to function. The first time, I cleaned migrated grease from the internal contacts and revived it. The second time we were on the road without all the tools needed and an auto-electrician sorted out a corroded earth for us. It has worked faultlessly ever since - at least until we were about two minutes into our journey yesterday, when Mick turned the windscreen wipers to intermittent, and they parked themselves half way up the windscreen. 

It didn't take long to establish that they were working fine, save for the park position, which in turn meant that it would be in our favour if it rained for the entire journey and thus we could just leave them running. It rained most of the time, so the time they spent in an inconvenient position was minimal. 

By the time we stopped for tea in Tesco's car park in Ashford, I'd concluded that this couldn't be a repeat of the grease migration issue that caused the first failure (and that I know can also cause a park issue), but had to be that the wiper mechanism had slipped on the motor spindle. As we sat at the Chunnel terminal, I offered to sort it out, but given that it was both dark and raining, Mick suggested that it could wait until this morning. 

So, the first task in our leisurely start today was to disconnect the wiper linkage from the motor and reposition it. It was a relief to find that the securing nut wasn't even hand tight, confirming the diagnosis, and thanks to having taken it apart so many times last year, I could immediately see that it wasn't in the correct position. It can't have taken more than five minutes to sort it out.   

The wipers were called into use a few times during the day, but the more notable features of the weather were the warm (relatively) temperature and the periods of sunshine. It has been so grey and miserable at home for all bar a scant few days thus far this winter, that it was a pleasant change to see the sun and feel such heat through Bertie's panoramic windscreen. 

There's nothing else to say about today's journey. Each year I check my handwritten notes in our road atlas, and read my blog to see what we did on the previous year's journey. I don't need to make any notes about the route choice this year, as we did exactly the same as last year. The one toll road section we used had gone up by just 20c. The only stops (save for a driver-swap micro-pause) were at a supermarket at lunchtime (groceries first, then lunch in the car park), and a petrol station just before our destination. We arrived in Villedômer at quarter past five, which didn't feel too bad considering we didn't hit the road until a few minutes before 10am. 

Straight out for a brisk, but brief, leg-stretch we went, ending at the patisserie to sort ourselves out with something for pudding tonight:

 

The stream next to the Aire in Villedômer is running high

Bit soggy on the fields too

From the local patisserie (sorry - too much effort to rotate it now I've uploaded it)

 

Thursday 5 February: Wissant

Where’s Bertie? He’s in the Aire at Wissant (France), at a cost of €11 (including 50c tourist tax each).

Weather: Rain

What a hectic 36 hours! At 11am yesterday we were sitting having coffee and a crossword in town, on our way to the supermarket, with no expectation that we would be in France by the end of today. Indeed, we’d just about given up on our Jan/Feb trip to Spain this year.

I’d originally booked our Chunnel tickets back in November, to cross on 10 January. The spanner that got thrown in that works was that I found a lump in my breast when we were in Wales at the end of December. I wasn’t overly concerned, sure by its traits that it was a cyst, but thought I’d best let the doctor confirm that.

The doctor wasn’t particularly reassuring, and referred me to the breast clinic on a 2 week wait basis. This still gave time to get my appointment through, get the all-clear and be off to Spain on our 10 January booking ... except that the appointment finally came through for 3.5 weeks later. So, the booking was moved, such that I would attend my appointment, they’d confirm it was a cyst, either drain it or not, immediately discharge me, and we’d be on our way three days later.

The fly in that ointment was that they found an atypical cyst, and thus it required a biopsy. The consultant’s opinion was that it would be unwise to remove myself to Spain whilst awaiting the result. So, we moved our outbound ticket to August, figuring that would give us flexibility to either move it forward again, or use it in the summer (but completely forgetting that I’ve entered a race one week after the date that I moved it to – doh!).

When I received a phone call just before lunch yesterday, confirming that the biopsy had come back clear, we quickly looked at a calendar. Was there still time to make a trip to Spain a reasonable thing to do, considering that our return date was fixed and unmoveable? Yes, we decided, there was.

A frantic afternoon ensued, firstly sorting out travel insurance, then moving our Chunnel ticket once again, then packing in such a disorganised fashion that you’d think we’d never packed for a trip before in our lives. An equally frantic morning ensued today - a stark contrast to our usual take-a-few-days-about-it approach to packing. Half an hour ahead of schedule we jumped into Bertie and were off. We are yet to discover what we have forgotten, but I’ll be surprised if we managed to remember everything*. 

We arrived at the Eurotunnel terminal early enough to be offered a crossing 2 hours before the one we’d booked, at 1916 but half an hour later, the departure boards told us it was moved to 2016  (the App confirmed the rescheduling whilst simultaneously saying there were no delays, so apparently moving the time of a crossing doesn’t count as a delay). At 1915 our crossing suddenly changed back from 2016 to 1916 with the status ‘Boarding Closed’! We finally set out under the sea at around 2040, so still earlier than we had been booked, but an annoying set of circumstances, given that if we’d ignored the information on the board and just proceeded to the departure lanes, we would have crossed so much earlier.

With the time difference, it will be a late arrival in Wissant, but less painful than the alternative option we considered, which was the 0320 crossing tomorrow morning.  

(*yes, we do have a comprehensive checklist, but it wouldn’t be possible to cover everything. By way of an example, Mick picked up our Euro notes yesterday, but it was only in the middle of the night that I suddenly thought that our ‘float’ bag of Euro coins was probably no longer in Bertie, and whilst going without it wouldn’t have been disaster, but as we don’t tend to use cash on a day-to-day basis to accumulate change, it’s good to hold onto a stash of coins for things like the laundrette.)