Bolougne to Bensheim

Now, the plan was that I would start up the Nokia Sports Tracker program as we got off the boat at Boulogne, and track the journey, so you could all visit the site and see my journey on a map. So far so clever... Unfortunately as I arrived at Zoe and Christoph's house, my phone ran out of battery, and died in my arms. Well, my pocket. Fool that I was, I thought it would be OK to just turn on the phone, and it would have saved all that information.

So it appears that I'll have to take you on a virtual journey, showing you, through the power of words, just where we went today.

I was rather glad the girls and I took our travel sick pills as we arrived in Dover this morning, as the crossing, which will no doubt be described as "Millpond Smooth" by Andrew, was a bit choppy, and we all felt a bit queasy.

While I would love to spend some time painting the picture of how beautiful Europe is, as we move from Summer to Autumn; how the scenery we passed was gorgeous and lush - I can't. We passed Lille and entered Belgium, which is not at all exciting. In fact, we spent far too much time in Belgium, prompting Lottie and I to do a quick route change on the fly, and decide to go through Luxembourg. Since I've never been to Luxembourg, I thought this might be interesting. So, the route - TSt Omer, Lille, Tournai, Mons, Charleroi - then we turned right and headed for Luxembourg, and on to Saarbruken, passing to the north, Kaiserslauten, Mannheim and finally Bensheim. At which point we got lost! I know the phone does navigation, but when we tried to get the thing to navigate us, it asked too many complex and confusing questions, so we ended up cancelling that! Lottie, ended up using the phone and telling me where to turn.

I liked Luxembourg - although it's possible this may have been prompted by the fact that petrol is substantially cheaper there than the surrounding countries. Thank you Jonathan's nephew, Tim, for that sound piece of advice. I also like the motorways of Germany - although I'd said I wasn't going to be busting a gut to get here, we'd stopped so long in Luxembourg that I did push it a little after that. And yet, even doing 90mph, I was more often overtaken that the one doing the overtaking!

This morning we've already walked the girls to school (they normally do this on their own - it's 5 minutes) and it's not yet 9am!