In early 2020 with a full summer of weddings and holidays planned who would have though the anxiety of watching things being cancelled left right and centre. But our french trip still seemed to be a thing! Holding our nerve at the last minute as Spain got added to the banned list keeping our fingers crossed that France wasn’t going to be next.
6am everyone up. Car packed the night before. It’s amazing how much lay minute additions fill up our minimal packed car. 8:30 rolled around very quickly as we all jumped in the car and set off towards Dover.
After a fairly easy car journey down to Dover also got to checkout the Dartford bridge with no tolls for the first time, we arrived nice and early in time to watch some of the ferry man overs. Toby also got a wave from a passing Police car. Loading time soon arrived and we managed to bag one of the car spots at the front of the ferry. On board everything felt a bit like no one from DFDS really bothered about people going back on their ferry’s. Everything was basically closed on board apart from the restaurant where we grabbed some lunch. With Calais in sight jumped back into the car for our next leg of the journey.
French roads are fairly well maintained and it was a simple drive down to our first stopover Rouen. Although the ‘peage’ motorway tolls are slightly confusing. Once we got into Rouen everything got a little bit more tricky as everything moves a lot quicker, they have low underpasses which the car and top box might not have survived plus we had a screaming baby in the back who had been asleep for the rest of the journey. Waze navigates is through to our hotel where we managed to find a parking space nearby and checked in.
A really cheery lady greeted us at the front desk and sorted out our room key and we headed up to the room.
Once we’d unpacked for evening we headed into the centre of Rouen where we tested out our French skills and ordered pizza and wine for dinner.
