Well, there it is, 1059.1 miles in one drive. 20 hours behind the wheel (apart from the ferry crossing ? which was a fairly horrible experience. Thousands of sleep-deprived, irritable people looking for a square of carpet that wasn?t quite so stained and wet that they might be able to curl up on the acrylic pile and get a few minutes sleep before the hours of driving they had to come ? unless of course they were Calais residents. In which case, the ferry journey must be far more enjoyable.).
After the queues and road works on the English roads (even at 1am on a Friday morning in December), the drive isn?t too bad with good roads through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. These helped with the average speedof 68mph across the trip. Once in Poland, the road surface deteriorates dramatically. I?m told it is still the original road laid by Adolf when he was heading east ? it runs directly from Berlin to Wroclaw (or Breslau as he would have had it). The Hitler Highway is made of blocks of concrete and the joint between each block has become a car-shuddering gap that when traveled over makes the car sound like a cantering horse. The surface is so bad, you have to slow right down to about the speed of a cantering horse! This road will be one of the main routes in to the country for the visiting football fans during the 2012 European Championships. I hope there?ll be a resurfacing job done first.
We hit Wroclaw at 6pm. The city, the fourth biggest in Poland, has no ring-road or by-pass. Everyone has to travel straight through the middle. In the darkness, the torrential rain and in a right-hand drive car, the cobbled streets, tram-lines and traffic are a real challenge, especially at this stage of the journey.
The thing that makes the journey worthwhile is the greeting we get when we arrive. We staggered in and were greeted with open arms, kisses and best wishes. Then huge, steaming bowls of home-made mushroom soup, followed by (at my request) golompki. This translates as pigeons but is in fact seasoned mince and rice, wrapped in cabbage leaves and boiled. It is fantastic.