We set off next morning to continue our journey to Calais by autobahn for the majority of the way, skirting Dusseldorf (quite busy), then crossing into Holland near Eindhoven which was even more busy. We had intended to stop on a rest area in Holland, but they all seemed to be extremely small and each one was more or less filled with a service station with very little parking for long outfits.


 We kept going on to Belgium, again intending to stop for a meal, but got caught up in the roadworks near Antwerp which made it very slow going. Finally we extricated ourselves and found a service station which had LOADS of parking and the most posh facilities we encountered on our trip: green marble sinks at different levels, lovely tiling round and all spotless. Yes, they cost 50c to enter via a turnstile, but you got that off any food you bought from the shop, so we had a coffee and sandwich.

We decided that as we only had about 100 miles to go, we would carry on to Guines in France that evening, hopefully getting some diesel on the way – Hubby didn't want to pay Belgian prices and worked out that we had enough to get us to France. I phoned the Castels & Camping site in my very rusty French to a) book a pitch and b) let them know we would be arriving about 19.30 - fortunately they had room, although it was a close-run thing as out of 198 pitches they only had 4 spare. Even more fortunately the diesel held out and we arrived with 9 miles showing….. we hadn’t passed a garage at all, at least not one accessible from the autoroute. We checked in and settled ourselves on a large pitch at the rear of the site, then walked down to the restaurant for our evening meal.