2017-08-16 Wohnmobil Stellplatz Potts BRAUEREI to Gravelot aire in Calais

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Wohnmobil Stellplatz Potts BRAUEREI to Gravelot aire in Calais

We are up and away early again here at Potts Brewery in Germany, on the road before 7.00 am as we have 500km to travel to reach Calais tonight. This is not how motorhome wandering around Europe tasting wines and enjoying ourselves is supposed to be. We are forced to drive all day again so that we can be back in the UK for an event that we committed to. It’s a lesson for the future.

We are booked on the 6.00 am tunnel crossing tomorrow morning so would like a restful evening in Calais later today. We rejoin H.2 and continue on our way with commuters in the early morning mist. In places it is quite thick, making eerie shapes appear and disappear as we drive along H.2. We stay on H.2 for 125km passing Dortmund and Essen to Duisburg, where we take H.40. From Duisburg we cross the Rhine at Venlo, into Belgium and continue on the E67 for another 180km to Antwerp.

From Antwerp, the E17 to Ghent and E40 past Bruges, Dunkirk and Calais, another 200km! We arrive at Calais around 4.30 pm and it is very busy. We make our way to the coast and find the Aire de Camping Calais or Le Grand Gravelot (the large plover… there are a lot of them!). We book in at Reception and find a spot. It is a super site, having been modernised and levelled with tarmac only this year, much to the disgust of the French and English caravanners who, until now had a very large and cheap area to park on in Calais. The new caravan and camp site is also new but further down the road. It looked good to us but… how people hate change!

We call at the supermarket and fill up with wine and cheese and then sit outside and enjoy our last night in Europe and the hot and sunny evening. Definitely not a good day, a day of driving, driving and more driving. Both our phones stopped working, we presume that’s because today is a month in Europe which is what our packages give us. No point worrying about that, Gill navigates really well with conventional maps, and we still have off-line map applications on our phones that will work without a data connection.