Another day, another country to travel through! This time on bike…

To avoid some of the UK traffic, we left The Cottage shortly after 6am and drove with the bikes loaded in the back of the van to Loddington, where we had a happy day flying the kite and catching up with Mom and the little nuggets who were also visiting. It was good to be back so soon as we both had more Paris stories to share, photos to swap and questions for each other!

After dinner, we continued east to Harwich, and parked up the van. With the bikes loaded up for the next 10 days of travel, we continued under peddle power in the dark to the Ferry Port. After only 100m of travel a car swerved around Clare and nearly knocked her off her bike, so it was a bit of a shaky start to the tour and we were very glad to get to the safety of the passport office and onto the boat!

We’d left it as late as we dared to check in and it paid off as we barely had to queue or wait (which would have been outside it the dark!). Having had our passport stamped, we followed a bike lane around to the front of the ferry, then up a ramp and straight into the mouth of the boat, which was very exciting!

We had to secure our bikes to some railings, then an elevator took us up to the 10th floor, where we went straight to our cabin, having been given the room keys when our passports were stamped. Very slick.

We took a short walk around the ferry where there was a little duty free shop and a few bars, but decided we’d rather get some sleep than have a drink, as by now it was nearly 23:00. We clambered into our bunks and were soon asleep – The tour has started!…