Middle-aged flash packers

Road trip to Austria September 2025

Day 1 – Laon, France

Lying on a beach in the day , sipping cocktails at a beach bar at night holds quite a bit of appeal to me at the moment. Sadly it doesn’t for Steve, hence we are catching a ferry to Calais  and motoring through France and Germany: destination Austria.

To be fair, I’m quite excited. The trip has been slowly evolving over the last few days; a mix of stumbling across places that seem interesting  for  an overnight stop,  and suggestions from people who have discovered places on their own journeys. We’ve always been wary of taking other people’s advice,  having ended up in a couple of places we’ve absolutely hated but time to try again – and google first.

We got to the ferry port (very) early but it was fine, wiling the time away by watching campervans  disembark (whatever happened to caravans) and googling the names of show jumpers who were frail looking girls driving a massive horse bus.

Onto the ferry and into the club lounge where a glass of Sancerre suddenly switched the holiday mood on. 

Back in the saddle, it was an easy drive from Calais along the motorway for a couple of hours to our first stop Laon. 

Laon has a gothic cathedral and a citadel and seemed like an interesting place for our first overnight stop. Our motel was no frills but perfectly acceptable and clean. We had a nice meal at the Au Bureau. I think it’s a chain restaurant which is a good thing when it comes to France in my opinion. I’ve had too many grim meals in France to be able to agree with “the best food in the world” badge it continues to give itself. At least with a chain restaurant there’s a basic standard  of hygiene which has to be met.(fingers crossed)

All good then until we wandered past the down- at-heel hotel next to us, laughingly called “premier class hotel”. I could be totally wrong, but I’m pretty sure it’s either  a holding hotel for asylum seekers or for migrant labourers harvesting produce  in the fields. Whatever,  they  are a noisy bunch who seem very keen on the wacky baccy. I looked up the reviews of the Premier class hotel from unsuspecting holiday makers who stayed there, probably on their way to a gorgeous villa in the South of France. Needless to say the reviews  were toe curling. I shall give you a couple of snippets:

“I found a burn mark plus multiple dark hairs on the INSIDE of my sheets. Please note I am blonde and had not been near the bed before discovering this.”

“We stayed here and there was an open knife under one of the covers in the bed”

However, not everyone was unhappy :

“Very cheap and very basic and very perfect. I felt like a Trappist monk on a bender…”

On that note I bid you good night. White noise machine on, eye mask in position. Sleep, please come very soon.

Pray for me.