And off we go
France here we come! A ridiculously early start, we met Katie, Dad, Phoebe and Jude at 0520 and off we all went.
No you are not imagining it, Hallie totally has on her school uniform, and to be honest Ruby does too, she is just hiding! They totally refused to go to bed last night and eventually fell asleep still dressed. When I woke them up at 0445 there was no way they were cooperating to get dressed, so got in the car as they were! Yeah today I was that mum, picking my battles.
The roof box was making a horrendous noise and was driving me insane so we stopped after 15 mins at South Mimms and attempted to tighten it. Thankfully a lovely guy stopped behind us in his hgv and offered to redo it for me, saving us a lot of hassle. Love that there are some genuinely lovely people out there. We were soon back on the road and whizzing our way down to catch Le Shuttle!
Considering I’d not been to bed I felt remarkable awake and it was an easy journey, we even managed to catch an earlier train.
Once French side the journey continued to be easy. It always takes me a while to get the driving on the other side of the road thing into my head but once it’s in, we are all good. The roads are good here, it’s an easy drive – just a long one.
About midday the sleepiness hit me like a blow to the face and I genuinely struggled to keep my eyes open for a while. I called Katie, to confess how bad I felt and she had hit the same wall! So we pulled over at the next stop for coffee. Strong, bitter, service station machine made coffee! Well it was not pleasant but seemed to do the trick – for a while at least!
Hallie took a couple of long naps, which was great for her. Not sure the other two even dozed for a couple of minutes between them! Crazy kids. I used to sleep a fair bit when we drove all over Europe with Mum and Dad in our summer holidays. Katie and I used to stretch out across the back seat and sleep as much as we could!
We stopped four times on the way down usually its twice at the most! But it made their journey more pleasant for all. Although I actually did wonder at one point if St Jean de Monts had upped and moved further down the coast as it seemed to be taking forever to get there. We finally arrived around 7pm!
They were all so excited to have arrived, ok so was I! They dashed off to see what was new and were delighted to find out that one of the parks had been massively upgraded and now included a huge trampolined / netted / climbing thing – it looks great but to be honest I was more interested in unloading and making a cup of tea this evening! I’ll go and take a proper look tomorrow .
