This morning we had a tough decision to make: should we use the planned route across country using ‘small’ roads or use motorways instead? The motorway route was about 1.5-2h shorter and took us via Luxembourg and Belgium. The non-motorway route is obviously slower but more picturesque and goes via one of the cemeteries Pen’s interested in.
Eventually, considering that 8.5h is a long time to travel, we opted for the motorway route at a mere 6.5 hours.
It started well; the French motorways are rather quiet and fairly relaxed but it was busy around Nancy, which was far from fun. One of the bad habits of European drivers seems to be that they’ll sit only a few metres of your rear. Whilst the BMW is fast and can out accelerate pretty much anything we saw it doesn’t help when there are speed cameras dotted around motorways. The French mostly keep to the limits so it’s easy enough to pass without going too fast and easy enough to keep people off your rear.
However, once we reached Belgium the story changed. The Belgians are bad drivers. We’d seen this in France too where we’d come across several of the red-plated freaks. They have the bad habits of the French and British. Their speeds are all over the place, they drive too close, they weave through traffic, they go for gaps which don’t exist. No lane discipline, no patience, no clue. And again speed cameras on motorways which the locals will know but the foreigners don’t. Add into the mix numerous sets of road works and heavy traffic and after an hour or two it was too much for both of us. We came off at Mons, which was actually very close to a cemetery so stopped there for a rest and for Pen to find one of her soldiers.
Afterwards we decided to try the non-motorway route for the remaining 128km. This put the remaining time at 2.5h (2h for the motorway route) so decided it was worth it. The sat nav took us back through Mons and straight into a mile long traffic jam. We stuck this out for a while, through Tournai but then decided to take the motorway around Lille, which from previous experience is a nightmare. Within seconds of setting the sat nav it had us turn into a highway, four lanes wide of stationary traffic. Again we had to plough through this until we got through. Then it took us off to avoid more motorway congestion only to find that a) the congestion reported on the Real Time Traffic disappeared almost instantly and b) we were back on our non-motorway route.
The final insult came when we turned off the motorways entirely for the last 20km or so… spent behind a tanker behind a tractor. Painfully slow. Overall the journey lasted longer than the predicted back-roads route we’d originally planned. And with a lot of stress and hassle.
The impressive thing is that until Mons we’d been clocking up 35mpg+ and an average of 67mph. Ultimately we finished up with about 34mpg and about 50mph.
We arrived at the B&B fairly late and there was no one to be found so we wandered around the house and the, extensive, gardens but without luck. After about 15 mins our hostess appeared from nowhere claiming to have been in the garden. She is a lovely but eccentric lady with a giant cat, a Maine Coon. Hers is a mere kitten weighing in at 5kg and could easily exceed 7kg as an adult. Pedigree too. And it was the soppiest animal we’d ever seen. She played with him like a doll, or a baby chimpanzee and he loved it. Most cats would have started ripping strips off after just one second of that attention.
She advised us to try a restaurant about 20 mins away in Hazebrouck but we finished up at the one next door. The waitress was working very hard – she didn’t stop moving for a second even though she only had two sets of customers. The food was fairly decent for a Brasserie-type of place.
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