9th July 2012

Steve: As luck would have it the church bells had been turned off at 9pm, but at 7 o'clock Sunday morning they certainly made up for it.

The local bell ringers must be on steroids to make that much noise - a barrage of clanging discordant bells fit to wake the dead! We leapt out of bed and watched the great and the good file into the small church, needless to say we declined, so with no chance of a lay-in we went down for a cracking breakfast with scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, fresh fruit, yoghurt and toast , just what we needed with such a long ride ahead of us and only motorway service food to look forward to.

We had decided to ‘go for it’ and put in a couple of long days to make our way back to the Eurotunnel, which were also pretty boring as most of it was motorway.  But for our sins the sat-nav non-motorway route had taken us along one of the many German ‘motorbike routes’ which are both picturesque and winding, which normally could have been great fun except being a weekend it was heaving with about 20,000 BMW GS’s, cars, caravans, coaches.. you name it, I tried to overtake it.

Debs:  Eventually we arrived at our cheapie hotel, a Formule 1 in a small village just over the  French border, and having booked in and climbed out of our bike gear we sat with our tummies rumbling for food.  Fortunately, on the way in I had seen a kebab shop and decided this was definitely our supper destination, but on arrival we found it was also the hang-out for the select group of the local Turkish tough boys, all with the same hair cuts and a ’special’ hand shake! Keeping our giggles to ourselves (they were also large tough boys) we demolished our kebabs and headed back to the Formule 1 ready for an early night and the last hit to Eurotunnel.