2025 September: France and Germany – Home to Truck Stop on A1
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It is the first day of meteorological autumn here in Lancaster, and we clean and sort Hymer ready for a motorhome trek through France and Spain. Having missed the opportunity to book the ferry to Spain we are left with the long drive through France, who complains about driving through France, certainly not us. On this occasion there are two new things that we want to try out, first is the Camping-CarPark network for overnight stays, and second is the Paeage toll roads. In the past we have always avoided the toll roads in France, now we want to move more quickly than usual and cover the distance more quickly so we are going to spend the money we saved by not booking Brittany Ferries on road tolls.
My personal view is that toll roads are bad for the economy in general because the road tolls are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for everything, which means lower overall sales because prices are higher. Toll roads certainly increase the number of heavy goods vehicles that drive through small French villages and along the ‘free’ roads, avoiding tolls increases costs in other ways — longer journey times, increased fuel consumption and wear and tear on trucks. Toll roads are wonderful for the French government because the government does not have to pay the costs of building the road and then collects VAT on the road tolls — perfect sense to politicians. Rant over!
On Sunday evening in readiness for our trip today we picked the apples from the apple tree in the garden: 142 lb plus 77 lb of windfalls we had already collected, a total of 209 lb of apples! Even after large bags to the neighbours and some friends, we were overwhelmed. Three trugs full in the shed, the fridge filled at home, plus a huge bag of the largest apples to come with us!
Our usual route to Folkstone and Le Shuttle is to take the shortest route offered by google maps. There are problems with that, the M25 being one, and M6 another and unpredictable slowdowns and collisions. This time we are breaking our journey and taking a different route. We leave home around 3.00 pm , driving south via the M6, M61, M62 to Ferrybridge where we turn south on A1M. The traffic is heavy around Manchester and Leeds (as expected) otherwise we have a reasonably good journey. Having driven 200km we stop near Greetham Valley and park up with the trucks on the bumblebee lay-by divided from the A1 by a bank of trees. It is named after the Bumblebee café that serves good wholesome truck food.
We open wine and heat the enchiladas left from yesterday. We were in bed before 10.00pm (the truck drivers having long since settled down) and had a good night, woken occasionally by a loud truck rumbling past on the A1.
Motorhome Trek Lancaster UK to Truck Stop on the A1
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