I’ve been driving FOREVER. In the first 24 hours I drove for 17 of them, and a good chunk of that time “off” was spent on the ferry. I am now definitely not a fan of mountain passes and joining the motorway in a right hand drive van with no rear windows, or indeed changing lanes anywhere involves the boy sticking his head out of the window and yelling “clear”.

We accidentally went to Luxembourg and I had a snooze in a service station in Belgium before stopping for the night in France. We downloaded this thing for Sean (he’s the voice of the satnav and im sure he will feature more at a later point) which has lots of useful POIs on it like where to get LPG gas from, and a list of all the Lidls in Europe. It also has aires listed on there and places where overnight parking is tolerated. We drove to one of the spots which had pretty decent facilities (i.e clean toilets and water) and then decided to have a day off driving. We got into the french mood buy buying lots of pastries from a weird bakery where the cakes were crawling with wasps. Needess to say we didnt have one of those. We spent the afternoon at a stork sanctuary which also turned out to be a sewerage works…

After reluctantly driving for another really long day, over the splurgen pass where we had to stop and have a hot chocolate while our breaks cooled down and smelled less burny, we decided to have a couple of days by lake como. On the drive towards it the valley was lit up by an amazing thunderstorm that coloured the sky purple and blue while the silluettes of the mountains jumped out at us. This would have been an amazing sight but Sean had taken us on a merry dance so we were a bit lost and a bit stressed and ended up sleeping in a car park with no campervan signs everywhere. The next morning we were able to find a spot right by the lake, and fortuitously, next to a few bolted sport routes. We had two days by the lake eating ice cream, swimming and climbing before heading up into the mountains.