2,218 miles later...

Another excellent road-trip across Europe is now complete. Whilst I didn't do as much talking as last time, I didn't have to listen to so much whinging either - swings and roundabouts I suppose. ;-)

I'll get some photos posted to http://picasaweb.google.com/idxxphotos.

Until next time...

Returning to England

The journey through Germany's secret hinterland, filled with towns you've never heard of with the biggest factories you're ever likely to see, whizzed past as you might expect on an empty speed limit free Autobahn. I made it to Luxembourg before midnight and crashed at a thankfully warm motel for only €20.

This morning's fog made the busier traffic at Brussels more interesting but I still made good time to Calais. Catching an earlier ferry takes away the time pressure for the final leg of the journey.

Appropriately enough, as the Pride of Dover carried me to France on Tuesday, the Pride of Calais is bringing me home. The captain promises we're leaving the weather behind us on the Continent and England should be clear.

Please don't misunderstand me

The Brenner Pass was spectacular as expected and I got there just in time before it got dark. The trip from Innsbruck has been exciting too with the Fernpass being the highlight - true to its name it's tree-lined and very pretty under its deep blanket of snow.

Anyway, to the purpose of this post. I'm currently resting after Wank (here near Nesselwang in Bavaria) and have just spent my wad on a sandwich and a coffee. Ho, ho, ho, juvenile humour at its best I'm sure you will agree. :-P

Heading for the hills

The 13th is lucky for me. Got a full tank of fuel and I've even managed to figure out how to switch my dashboard into kilometers. Not getting shot or killed by the locals was a real bonus(!).

Now I'm heading on to Verona where I'll be turning north for the run up to the mountains and Brennero.

Waiting in Brescia

With only 80km of fuel left and having driven past countless service stations that have all run out of fuel I have now found one near Brescia that is expecting a delivery. There's a very happy chap called (something like) Tinsoni who with his four words of English once visited Leeds and now feels like he is "my brother". He's brought me coffee and bread and moved my car up to the front of the queue - no one seemed to complain, I suspect he's the "big man" around here. I'm quite scared! :-)

In the meantime, an update from Yesterday. Venice was beautiful with a quite surreal atmosphere. At times it felt like we were in a huge themepark. And it was cold, especially on the water. We resisted the urge to take a Gondola trip as that would have been even colder. There's so much to see that in the end six hours was just not enough.

The trains and metro all worked well and we made it back to San Donato for 20:30, then to dinner with Dany. She took us to a truly fantastic Sicilian restaurant with some great fish dishes. The meal was great value too but for the €74 parking fine that Dany picked up.

A leisurely start this morning, a little bit of shopping and lunch. Then it was time for me to say farewell. Dany and Nobuko are hitting the fashion shops this afternoon and I'm hoping to make it over the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck before it gets dark.

Italian fuel strike!

I've just been reminded of a little problem that Dany failed to mention to me before I arrived in Italy. Every petrol station we've seen has been beseiged with customers trying to fit just a few more drops into their tanks and apparently now 8 out of 10 stations have no fuel at all. The queues are just crazy and do little to help a city already paralysed by too many cars. All very reminiscent of the UK protests a couple of years ago that were rumoured to be repeated this week.

I think I have 145 miles of diesel left which will hopefully get me far enough into Austria to find supplies. Otherwise it's going to be a long walk home. (Perhaps the BBC will send Ewan and Charlie's crew so we can make the third episode in the "Long Way" series.)

Trenitalia to Venice

Having escaped the morning mist and morning traffic(!) of Milano, we're now on the fastest train we could find to take us to Venice for the day. Out of the window we've got the fantastic vista of Lake Garda and the mountains on a clear day - picture postcard stuff.

My drive down yesterday went well in the end, despite the A1 being closed overnight and a late ferry crossing due to heavy seas. I decided to try the German Autobahns and this time they lived up to expectations. However, speed was tempered a fair bit by the rain from Koblenz to the Switzerland. As soon as I got to Basle everything got much colder and the driving snow as I headed up to the Gotthard tunnel was very exciting. Once on the other side everything was much drier. Tomtom had a laugh guiding me through the city centre to Dany's home in San Donato to meet with Frank and Nobuko. We then ate and drank the local fare before collapsing in preparation of an early start today.

A brief update on Nobuko's visits so far. After arriving on Saturday she's done: Lake Como with Dany on Sunday, Florence on her own (!) on Monday, Verona with Frank yesterday and Venice today with me. Tomorrow she's off to Madrid (flying via Roma) to see Javier before flying home again the following Monday.

The Nobuko reprise

As we all know Nobuko failed to make it to the party in Tuscany. But it would seem rather than not coming at all she is just running a little bit late(!). She arrived in Milan on Sunday and Frank's going to join her probably around about now.

I'm just about to set off and will hopefully meet up with the party in Verona sometime tomorrow lunchtime to early afternoon. We're then going to take in some of the sights of Northern Italy before Nobuko heads off to Spain to see Javier on her way back to her frozen home.

Updates for families and friends along with some photos will be posted as we go along.

Route post-mortem

I've been having a play with the routing you can do on Google Maps. If you click on the links below you should be able to see the route we followed, where we stopped and some of the places where significant "events" took place.

All works well apart from Day 3 where Google Maps simply won't navigate only the roads we travelled, hence this day appears in three parts.

The tally for the Google Maps route is 4520km. You can see from the picture that the actual distance driven was 4562km. No doubt some of the delta is by a couple of undocumented excursions to use the phone and the like. Even so, it's amazing how Google Maps manages to be 99.1% accurate over such a long trip.

Day 1 - Helmshore to Doncaster, Ashford, Dover, Calais, Bruges
673km, about 8 hours 42 mins

Day 2 - Bruges to Maastricht, Frankfurt, Davos
1,051km, about 10 hours 5 mins

Day 3 (Part 1, part 2, part 3) - Davos to Stelvio, Trento, Bar, Ristorante, Odina
611km, about 7 hours 13 mins

Day 4 - Odina to Castello d'Albola, Castello di Metelo, Odina
94km, about 1 hour 55 mins

Day 5 - Odina to Florence
72km, about 1 hour 22 mins

Day 6 - Florence to Helmshore
2,019km, about 20 hours 51 mins

Been there, done that!

Lisa kindly recorded (you can download it from Usenet if you haven't got a Lisa) episode 1 of the new series of the BBC's Top Gear programme that was broadcast while we were away. In it James, Richard and Jeremy set out to find the best driving road in the World.

Starting with a bit of fannying around near Monaco they head up to Switzerland and, after being booked overnight into a rather poor hotel, end up in Davos. From there they take the roads over the hills to Italy and ultimately Stelvio and realise they've found just what they were looking for.

This story sounds remarkably similar to our own experience. A similar route and a truly great road (although there was nothing wrong with our hotel). Anyway, the programme is well worth the watch if you get chance to see it.

Jeremy Clarkson, Oct 2007: "Davos to Stelvio, the greatest driving road in the World!" :-)

Around Europe in six days

I finally got home at 2:30 GMT after setting off at about 5:30 CET, a whole 22 hours later and its fair to say that I am some what short of energy! In that time we managed to pass through 10 countries (thanks TomTom and Dicky) and cover over 4500 Kilometers (that's 2800 miles for all the imperialists).

Today I managed to clock up my 11th country as I passed over the border between England and Scotland, adding a further 230 miles to the total journey.

Anyway, thank you all for a great weekend.

Home, at last

Well, I'm back. Had a fairly uneventful flight, two movies & lots of sleep. Just waiting for my bags (scooted past all the queues with my APEC card so I'm the only one through). Now all I've got to do is clear customs, find my taxi, and head home for a shower before going to work.

Can't wait to look through all the other photos. I'm sure there'll be some funny shots in there.

So that's all from me. This fantastic weekend has come to an end, and now it's back to reality. Thanks to everyone involved for making it so much fun. Cheers!

Photos anyone?

I've started to upload the 1600+ photos that were taken over our weekend break. As there are so many I'm just going to post them all, rather than worrying about adding the "out of focus" stickers.

You can find them at http://picasaweb.google.com/idxxphotos. If you would like any of them in their original full size resolution then just ask.

And if you would like any removing, make your request and we can all take a vote! ;-)

Just one more flight

And I'm off! The "Queenstown" aka tail number:ZK-SUI is my ship tonight, setting sail for the sunny shores of Auckland, New Zealand. I'm looking forward to a good sleep on the way. My seat is about a million times better than the last one. Not looking forward to work in the morning ;-)

See you in about 12 hours for what should be the final post (of my end) of the trip!

Back in LA

Well I've arrived safely, to the very busy and very hot LAX. Slightly stiff, tired (from only brief bursts of sleep) but feeling very happy for myself that I've been upgraded to Business for the flight home :-) Could have hugged the flight attendant in the Air New Zealand Lounge. I've now got two and 1/2 hours to kill before boarding. Almost three and 1/2 hours before takeoff. What to do...

I might have to go and buy another NZ->US plug adaptor for my laptop so I can use that instead of this public terminal in the lounge. Then I can play with some of the photos that I still have yet to get off the camera.

Very glad to hear that all the lads have arrived home safely, having made the ferry. Hopefully Phil gets to share a nice breakfast with Karen before he has to head out to work in the morning! Dicky has no such worries, of course, being unemployed :-P

Home, sweet home...

...for me at least. Phil's just left my house for the very last bit of our roadtrip - the 80 mile drive back to Lancashire on his lonesome.

The journey from Dover, with me driving, took the best part of 4 hours due to fuelling, numerous overnight lane closures and a ten minute stop at Watford Gap for more Red Bull. I hope there are no more roadworks to be found over the M62/M66 to slow Phil's journey.

Sailing into the night

Phil and I are just settling down in the Club Lounge ready for a smooth crossing to Dover on the Pride of Kent. Yet again the Priorité tickets were worth there weight in gold as we barely stopped from the border control to being on board at the front of the ship.

We also managed to catch the earlier ferry making the final leg a little bit easier. In the end it was a 14.5 hour drive from Florence to Calais.

An extra turn of speed through Belgium (the best way to head South from Calais I think) meant that our 20 litres of fuel added with 509km to go was only just enough to reach the port. For the last 30km I had to drop the speed to save fuel. We now have about 3 miles of petrol left to make it to a filling station in Dover.

You'll be glad to know Phil's got his car booked in for Friday morning to get the aircon sorted. In the end it wasn't too much of a problem for us, the windows still worked after all.

We'll now switch back to BST, mph and the right side of the road. We're not expecting any problems for the last leg of our journey, again, all fingers crossed.

Beating North through France

I have just vacated the driver's seat after driving the last 400+ km, leaving Dicky to drive the final leg of our continental relay into Calais.

Just as we thought we had escaped the lunatic Italian drivers another one appears to scare the pants off every road user in the vicinity.

We have also come to the conclusion that the French traffic police are easily confused, as we went through a laser speed trap (just like the one in Austria (spit)) slightly exceeding the speed limit, but fortunately the 8 police men waiting at the péage toll pulled the driver of a black BMW. As you can guess we didn't hang around just in case they discovered their mistake.

Dicky has also been very popular with open air photo booths that the French have in the middle of their motorways. He has also managed to get the satnav to take us though Luxembourg, making it 10 countries in 6 days!

Flying again

Defeated by technology again. Tried to no avail to get a Wifi connection in the Lufthansa lounge, but the T-Mobile system isn't accepting Credit Cards today! Painful. Gave up on the Internet, and had a Champagne lunch instead :-)

It's lucky my Nokia E61 works so well, otherwise i'd have died from 'net withdrawls on this trip!

The transfer went very well though, even though I've passed through something like 5 security checkpoints. Frankfurt is a huge airport, and it seems like 80% of the planes are Lufthansa.

It's good to see that Russ finally got an entry on the blog. Sounds like he had a fine old time in Bologna ;-) Should have flown from Florence! Then you'd have had company.

So I'm off now to flight no.2 for today. Tail number:D-ABTK, 747-400. Wish me luck that I don't perish mid-air from Deep Vein Thrombosis! :-D My seat doesn't even recline, and I'm parked next to two LA Nanas! Gotta love last class. Auf Wiedersein!

Nous sommes en France

We've just crossed the border into France at Basel. Now to Strasbourg, Reims and the eventually Calais.

Our prayers for better driving standards we're answered in Switzerland. It was a good job as our route took us through the 17km Gotthard tunnel, not a good place to chance having an accident. Quite an amazing construction with mad temperatures - 15C at the entrance, 35.5C at about 7km in and 9.5C when we saw daylight again.

Then we stopped about one hour ago in deepest, darkest Switzerland at the services at Rothenburg. With sandwiches, chocolate, Red Bull(!), water and fuel we both felt much better. Phil resumed as pilot and I had a snooze.

While I was sleeping the car's SatNav tricked Phil into coming off the motorway for a "shortcut". This combined with having to wait 30 minutes before entering one of the Swiss tunnels has seen our Calais ETA move out to 19:35. We're trying to fix that right now.