Bristol to Nuits St Georges

So the big day finally arrived with a 4.30am alarm call. We managed to get everything loaded into the car with a little help from Dad who had got up to help keep the cats out of the way and see us on our way, and were ready to set off at 5.20am.

I was in the driving seat for the UK leg of the journey, so had to be very grown up and choke back any tears as we pulled away from Mum & Dad's house.

We couldn't have timed it any better really - at that time of the morning on a bank holiday the roads were effortlessly clear, and even the M25 treated us incredibly well.

There was a beautiful sunrise as we drove eastwards, and once again, the British countryside did its best to make us feel terrible for leaving it - lush, green and beautiful.

Sunrise on the M4.

We made such good progress that we had to stop at a service station just outside Folkestone in order to avoid arriving at the tunnel too early - the paperwork advised us not to arrive more than 2h before our scheduled departure.

After a quick stop at the services we made our way to the Eurotunnel terminal and checked in - and were offered the opportunity to take an earlier crossing. We opted to go for the 9.20am crossing (an hour earlier than the one we'd booked), so parked up to get a coffee, breakfast and the essential driving kit for driving in europe: high vis jackets, a warning triangle, beam benders and GB sticker.

Stuart prepares the car for driving in Europe. (Unfortunately no-one prepared Stuart's wardrobe for travelling to the style capital of Europe.)

 We barely had any time to wait before we were loading onto the train.

Next stop France!

Being on the train was one of the weirdest sensations I've experienced - you feel the movement of a train yet sitting in the seat of a car. Quite bizarre. But even more unexpected was finding that we still had mobile signal and were able to text people from deep beneath the sea! Who'd have thought it?!

Before we had even had enough time for a quick snooze, we were disembarking in Calais and on our way into France. It all seemed so quick that I wondered if it was all a big rouse and whether we were actually still in Folkestone - but the French road signs and the cars driving on the right confirmed that we had actually left the UK.

The landscape for most of the journey was fairly unremarkable - we could easily have still been in England but for the architecture of the little villages which was distinctly French in character. We also noted how fond the French seem to be of wind turbines.

Wind turbines a plenty in France.

We stopped for a refreshment break at a service station at around 12pm - after such an early start we were ready for an early lunch and enjoyed eating our sandwiches sitting on the grass in the sunshine.

French services stations are more attractive than British ones - or maybe it's just the weather?!

We'd decided to aim to get as far as Dijon on the first leg of the journey, but in the end continued a little way past Dijon, to the town of Nuits St Georges. There, we quickly found the 'Ibis Budget hotel Nuits St Georges' - conveniently on the edge of town with easy access and car park.

Without even needing to utter a word of French we used the automated machine in the lobby to check availability and book us in for the night. The machine issued us with a receipt showing our room number and access code. The code was to be used for getting out of the car park, getting in through the main hotel door and getting into our room (nothing as traditional as room keys here...). As we unloaded all of our worldly possessions into the room that looked like a cross between a prison cell and a Travelodge room (some might say there isn't much difference between the two anyway), it fleetingly crossed my mind as to whether *everyone* in the hotel had been given the same access code and I started to wonder exactly how secure the room was. I put that to the back of my mind, until Stuart pointed out that our top secret secure room access code was simply the room number backwards twice...

My concerns about the security (or lack thereof) of our room containing all of our valuables made me reluctant to venture far from the hotel, so instead of a stroll into town to see what Nuit St Georges had to offer, we made do with a quick dash to the Carrefour hypermarket a few hundred yards from the hotel to pick up some basic essentials for a picnic and a bottle of plonk in our luxury surroundings:

Gastronomic delights.

Luxury accommodation.

The view was not bad though.

After a couple of glasses of wine (which barely touched the sides!) and some food we were ready for sleep - it had been a long day!

~ Helen