Alps 2020 - Day 1

And so, on his 18,795th day, Neil created The Road Trip. And it was good.

Well, hopefully.

My dream trip started rudely at 4.30 am with my alarm waking me. The forecast was for rain at that time but it was dry and off I set:

The hour or so to the Eurotunnel was uneventful and Zedster was purring nicely as I kept ahead of the rain. Amazingly, I slept for the whole 35 minute crossing - I'm not great at early mornings.

I planned to do much of the first leg to Dijon on the autoroute - almost 450 miles and much as I'd love to, I couldn't do all that on N roads in one day.

The next 4 hours were still quite fun (I'm just weird, I love driving long distance, even on motorways). I stuck to 65-70 mph because it was just more comfortable with no roof on. Long distance, the wind noise is significant and it was quite strange, I kept seeing the same UK cars flying past me - we did 300 miles leap-frigging each other despite the fact they were flying past me at 10+ mph each time and surely they weren't stopping every 90 odd miles that I had to? Part of this was my Liber-T tag which meant I never had to queue at the toll booths but still...

Traffic, as always in France, is so sparse, you sometimes feel you're in some sort of post-apocolyptic world, which I guess isn't too far out in the current times.

I got to Reims (300 miles) just after lunch,  so decided to come off the motorway and do the last section on some smaller roads and through some towns,  which was much more fun:

By this time, the temperature was up in the high 20s and I was getting suspiciously lobster like, even with suntan lotion on!

I finally got to Visoul,  about 20 miles from Dijon, and my hotel for the night:

Roof on in case it rains overnight, a quick, traditional French McDonald's for tea and I zonked out at 7pm, waking at 11pm to write this!

So, Zedster still in one piece and performing beautifully so far (better than me and my panda face), tomorrow is the start of some proper roads as I head into Switzerland, somewhere I've never driven in before - can't wait!!

Map of today's route: