Adventures of a Traveller

'Moose'

A Mad Dash Across France
7-9 June 1998

On Sunday afternoon of the Blenheim Palace weekend, we packed up our things, stuffed all our goodies in the back of the Traveller and headed for the south coast of England. We finally found a cosy B&B in the tiny village of Alfriston, where we quickly also found the local pub.

Monday morning, we headed for Dover to catch the 2:00pm hovercraft to Calais, France. We missed it. But we managed to get ourselves onto the 2:30pm SeaCat instead. Phew! 55 minutes later we were in France, with 14 hours of driving ahead of us over the next day and a half.

After checking the oil and water levels (oil level was down, probably due to the rocker cover leak - we'll see how things go) we headed off towards Reims. About half way there and just as we were beginning to have some faith in our new car, power suddenly dropped and Moose was running on 2 cylinders! At the side of the road a look under the bonnet revealed nothing. All the plugs were still in the car, all leads connected and no apparent reason for the sudden stop. After wiggling everything wiggleable, I tried the engine again. No problem. Sweet running as ever. ???!??!? Oh well, it must have been a loose wire ... we took off again albeit cautiously and distrustfully.

Six hours and numerous rest stops later we made it to Reims where we stopped for the night in a hotel. Apart from our little unscheduled stop, the northern area of France proved to be a very boring place to drive, especially on "les Péages". Just flat featureless farmland, and no sign of interesting little villages to visit. Not that we really had the time to visit them anyway. I had to be at work on Tuesday morning.

The remainder of the trip was pretty uneventful, apart from a pleasant little village somewhere in France that we stopped at for a photo shoot. We made it back to our 'home' in Lake Constance, Germany, about 14 hours drive after we left England. Moose had performed very well.

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