Thursday 4th July 2002
Independence Day... at last we get away. Up at 7am (after five hours sleep) to finish packing the car and get the last few bits and pieces together. Oh I forgot to say that it wasn't our Xantia being packed as Janie unfortunately had driven it into the back of another car on Monday, two days before... Instead it is a rental repmopile, a Vauxhall Vectra 2.2 which the insurance company is paying for...
So we get everything in and are away more or less by 10.15 - when I had been worrying about getting there if we left at 9... Well I needn't have been concerned. Despite traffic holdups on the M25 which meant over an hour to get to the M4, we arrived in Plymouth just five minutes after the official check-in time. We only had to substantially exceed the speed limit all the way, occasionally easing off to 80 (especially when we thought we were closer than we actually were)... a non-stop stressed-up 250 miles with no pee breaks for anyone - not even Janie who normally can't go past a motorway services area.
The ferry crossing was long and uneventful (Emma in mid-channel 'I want to get off!'.) Eventually we got to our hotel, the Ibis Roscoff, at about 10pm French time where we found that they hadn't taken the kids into account and that we were short of beds to the tune of two... so we had to change rooms, then i had to move the car several times, then we had whiskey and bed (by which time it was quite late). Oh did I say Emma and Lucy were really excited about it all!