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| 212 miles |
An early start after a very quiet night to a lovely morning. No facilities here but a super spot for an overnight stopover, so after breakfast away by 10.15 am. First stop, refuel as we don't want to pay motorway prices later on; by our calculations this should be enough to get back to Calais. Just in passing, a gas bottle ran out late last night but the second one should easily see us home.
The autobahn was busy, as expected, but as we approached Hamburg it slowed to a crawl through extensive roadworks and through the Elbe Tunnel. To be honest we could see no good reason why it should have been so slow, maybe just the sheer volume of traffic. It was exactly the same on the northbound carriageway once we were clear. The day was turning out very hot and we were glad of the air-conditioning, making sure that it was also blowing over Jamie who isn't a fan of hot. Approaching Bremen we pulled into a service area for lunch.
Up to now we had been following TomTom, programmed to take the best route to Calais. However checking the map we saw we could avoid the worst of industrial Germany by heading slightly north of west via Oldenburg then into The Netherlands, routing Gronenburg, Amsterdam then Antwerp, which is difficult to avoid whichever way you go. It didn't look much longer but much nicer and we quickly discovered that indeed this was so, being a lot quieter too.
Around 4-ish we thought we should have a quick stop to see to Jamie and took the opportunity of checking P4N as we'd decided to stop earlier rather than later today. Only a few minutes away we noted a dedicated M/H parking place in the small town of Zuibroek, no facilities but on the banks of a canal, so programmed TomTom who of course had no difficulty finding it; the problem was the driver following TomTom............ Said to have two larger bays then a dozen smaller we hoped one would be available and were initially disappointed to see that the only two vans there had used the large spaces. However we noticed that one of the smaller had been extended and was easily big enough for us so we slipped into it, with a little help from the ramps to get us perfectly level. Cold drinks definitely in order although the fridge only runs on 12v when we're driving so struggles just to keep things cool.
Today is and has been stiflingly hot and humid with only a light breeze to alleviate it. As I write at 7.00 pm it is still 33C, we're both flopped out and Jamie is moving from place to place to try and get cool - he's obviously not suffering as his tea disappeared within two minutes, but clearly he's not very comfortable. It's forecast to be just as hot tomorrow but perhaps with some cloud cover - we're not complaining though, we've been so lucky with weather on this trip.
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