A Long 24 Hours

It's the first day of holidays for me (Annie), and I got up at 4:30am to head to the Eurotunnel. I'm driving down to the south of France, Chris and the girls will join me tomorrow having flown in. 

The tunnel was a very fast and efficient crossing, albeit with noticeably stronger security checks in force. A lot of wiping of car door handles with white gloves, then going into a hut to test them...

I decided to avoid the carnage that is the Paris Peripherique this time, so went on a slightly less direct but much calmer route via Rouen and Le Mans. My end destination is near Limoges tonight - a total journey of 540 miles today. It sounds a lot, but when your regular commute to work is 100 miles each way, the miles do seem shorter. The French motorways are also a dream to travel on - mainly light on traffic and often quite pretty.

Highlights were:

- My first (and unusual) "driving on the left" mistake at a wonderful service station on the A16 in the Somme - thankfully with no cars coming the other way and I noticed quickly! The service station had a tower you could climb to see the view - great way to stretch travel tired legs.

- Finding that the Sanef Tag that allows me through the automatic lane at the toll booths without a ticket really works. This saves me the awkward, but amusing, need to get out of the car and comedy run round each time I need a ticket or to pay the toll. At one toll there were around 10 queues of 10 cars each - and none at the Tag only queue. I sailed through smugly...

- Rouen, which due to an epic fail in navigation I saw more of than intended. One wrong lane adoption (uncorrectable in heavy traffic) followed by another stupid mistake saw me heading at one point back east toward Calais and past some places I'd already visited.

- Le Mans 24 hour race circuit. Just a quick blip and run - I had a brief poke about the museum and shop, and listened to the roar of the cars on the track, but with over 2 hours' driving left I didn't have time to get too arty... I considered whether I could sneak our car out onto the track for a little go too, but as you can see there were no entry signs - my law abiding side was the only thing stopping me.

A long day made shorter by Podcasts and audiobooks in the car.