Middle-aged flash packers

Day 1. Home -Saint Quentin, France

At last, freedom has more or less returned and it has become possible again to travel from country to country within Europe without enormous hassle. Cue car loaded and ready for action. But where to? Anywhere that’ll have us. First stop France, on our way to Liguria to walk the Cinque Terra, then back to France and the Mercantour National Park and then – who knows?

Day 1 didn’t start well. I was castigated by S for not being ready on time (6 minutes late to be precise), then half way down the Marlow Bottom road, S realised he’d forgotten his toothbrush and we had to do an about turn. Revenge is most satisfying when it’s a dish served up very quickly.

Hitting the road during rush hour wasn’t our smartest move either. Google told us that our journey time had gone up by 45 minutes by the time we got on the M40 which was not what we wanted to hear. ( I blame going back for the toothbrush). However, we settled in for the long haul and actually arrived at Dover with plenty of time to spare.

Travel discussions during our lockdown periods were along the lines of “pimping” our trips when we could finally travel, I.e we’re not getting any younger, what are we saving the money for etc,etc. Well, we pimped it on our ferry sailing. As well as priority boarding, we booked ourselves -wait for it- seats in the relax lounge. For the princely sum of £6 each, we enjoyed “business class” seats with a view out to sea. My head has been turned. No more struggling to bag a table with the hoi polloi , it’s first class cruising all the way for me.

Suitably refreshed by our celeb-worthy travel, it was full steam ahead to Saint Quentin, our first stop of the trip. Our arrival at our accommodation was made more complicated than it needed to be by the closure of the road we were staying in. Why the B and B owners hadn’t thought it worth mentioning is beyond me. Both ends of the road were shut giving us a lateral thinking style puzzle as to how to get as close as possible to it. We cracked the code and managed to find somewhere to park, only to have no-one at the property to greet us and no way of getting in. This was turning out to be the French version of Crystal Maze. We got in by persuading another guest to let us follow them in. Eventually Steve got hold of the owner who said we’d completed the task correctly and told us where the key was.

But it still wasn’t over. Next was the physical challenge of avoiding the dog shit on the pavement (sorry but Monsieur et Madam Francois your habit of letting your chien crap anywhere it feels like is tres disgusting) and getting our cases up a spiral staircase without dying by the time we reached the top. We made it and having considered that we had indeed made it through the Crystal Maze, rewarded ourselves with a shower followed by a beer in town.

Dinner was disappointing for me (slow cooked pork belly turned out to be a very salty bacon chop -yuk ) but a late evening wander along the very pretty surroundings of SQ revived us and we’re looking forward to moving on to Mâcon tomorrow.