Eurotrip 2009: Day 1

Here are a few photos from the first day! We set off bright and early and headed for Dover..

..in time for our 6am sailing! We stopped off at Pease Pottage in the dark to stock up on millions of English snacks for the trip, and then headed off! The roads were nice and empty, so we got there pretty fast! I happened to spot this parked up next to us at Dover while we were waiting for the ferry.. Pampers and Relentless.. someone was in for a fun-packed holiday!

It was quite good timing actually because the sun was just coming up properly when we got on the ferry, so we got to see the sunrise over the channel! I don't remember too much after that.. I seem to have lost a couple of hours of my memory, but there are lots of photos of James laughing hysterically with tears streaming down his face, so I think we must have been a bit tired!!

The next thing I remember was waking up on the ferry, just as it was arriving in Dunkerque! Nice and fresh for a day in Bruges..

We climbed up the 366 steps of the Belfry before breakfast..

..and then went for a boat trip before our lunch! Frites and mayo in the square, it had to be done! I nearly took a photo but we were being plagued by wasps..

Next stop.. Luxembourg City.. a very promising bridge..

but not too much else! We did have some very interesting sandwiches though.. sugary bread?! It went OK with my salmon, but I'm not too sure about James' chicken! Anyway, we read in our guidebook about this amazing castle in Vianden, about 40 minutes away, it was a little out of our way, but we couldn't pass it up! I'm glad we didn't.. it's a lovely little village in the middle of loads of wooded hills, dominated by this amazing Dracula's castle type thing.. you'd never know it was there!

Well it was pretty much sunset when we left Vianden, and set off for Strasbourg.. for some reason we decided to tell our SatNav to avoid all toll roads and motorways.. great idea I must say! Haha.. 3 hours later we were running out of petrol, going down some neverending country lane in the middle of nowhere, with no street lights or cats eyes.. either in Luxembourg, Germany or France, we weren't quite sure! We eventually made it into a town, to our relief, only to be greeted by a row of cones with flashing lights on top, blocking the road ahead! Uh-oh.. we sat there for a while, but with no way of telling SatNav, we finally decided the best thing to do would be to play ignorant foreigners and drive around the road block and carry on down the road anyway! Don't you just love tight suspension and pot-holes.. what a combo.. we had about a mile of driving past diggers and hoping not to fall into any precipices, and then we finally made it out and into a service station, phew!! Petrol and sleep.. and to think that our original plan was to stay in Bruges on the first night?! We got a little ahead of schedule there!