Europe, Sept 2023, Day 1

Travel, long pause, travel, unexpected pause, travel, travel, pause, travel, pause, travel, pause [dry heave], travel, stop, drink.

That a long journey from the UK should involve, well, travel of some sort, interspersed with pauses, should be no surprise. That said, some of the pauses we encountered weren’t quite what we expected…

Part the first

Obviously, an early start is preceded by a dreadful night’s sleep. Regardless, up at 4-something a.m. for a 5am sharp (that is, 5.15 or thereabouts) departure, was the order of the day. The sole upside was a clear run at the Dartford bridge and A2-M2-M20 funbundle. No surprises in that lot, but we hadn’t appreciated quite how SNAFU’d Le Shuttle would be by the knock-on effect of that fella that selleotaped himself underneath a food truck to get out of Dodge-cum-Wandsworth.

The queue was very British in its scale, beginning about a femtosecond after check-in, snaking around to the terminal & car park, through the car park two ways, then recombining long before passport controls anglais et français. Sandwiched - between the two border bits in no-person’s land - were pretty comprehensive armed vehicle searches and random swabbing of steering wheels and other touch points. I’d missed the news about the bomb scare the day before. Ah.

Part the second, choo choo!

Once searched, swabbed, made to feel unwelcome to leave the UK, and less unwelcome to enter France (the small patch of land in Kent), we finally got to our train without further complication. Due to the fact that my car is low, wide-ish, and has daft pointy-out-bits that get on badly/expensively with ramps, I’d claimed to have bikes on the roof, which is the commonly accepted dodge to get on the carriages for big-stuff-wot-doesn’t-do-ramps. We wound up being the meat in a Tesla-Porsche-Range Rover sandwich - not entirely sure why those couldn’t go the normal way, but whatevs.

The next bit is something many of us have done many, many, times, right? Stop, engine off, handbrake on, 1st gear, windows half down, yada yada yada. Then set the car to driving-on-the-right-lights, kilometers for the speedo, set SatNav for the heart of the su… next bit of the journey, and snooze for about 30 mins.

Right… right?

No.

Some of that happened, then, CLUNK.

Most of the lights went out. The train slowed down. The ventilation stopped. The train stopped. A few clicks and clunks, and…

SILENCE… I mean SILENCE. A few voices. Then, again, SILENCE.

It started getting hotter.

The background noises seemed to grow louder, as the automatic gain control of our ears kicked in.

Pretty sure I could hear other people looking at each other in their cars, not wanting to voice their thoughts.

There’ll be an announcement, we thought… “Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay, we’re being held at a red signal, blah blah blah.”

Except there wasn’t an announcement for, I dunno, five or ten minutes. Which felt like about a damn week. I’ve taken the chunnel countless times. It feels… always felt… utterly familiar, reliable, secure, safe.

I have precisely zero frame of reference for stopping sous la bloody manche. And, naturellement, my imagination was doing fucking backflips. (Sorry Mum & Dad, if you read this: while I played it cool in the text messages, reality was hot, sweaty, and - oh yes - borderline terrifying.)

Eventually, an announcement crackled from the speakers, about as clear and comprehensible as most train announcements, but perhaps a mite more important. So we still didn’t know what was actually going on, but shortly after, a slightly harassed-looking Personne du Shuttle appeared and began to hand out water from an enormous bag the poor sod was lugging about.

That finally broke the tension: we weren’t about to punted up the luggage by the train behind us if he was handing out water; the tunnel exit in France hadn’t been done in by someone letting off “a big firework” meaning we had to reverse out back to Kent (or still legally France, but in Kent), if he was handing out water; there hadn’t been a big “fizzle pop” sort of noise in a critical substation supplying power to the whole enterprise meaning we had to continue on foot, if he was handing out water…

Then we started moving - and breathing - again.

Part trois

And then we were swiftly out the other end, off the train, and on our way across la belle France, imagined buttock-clenching potential-disasters behind (ha, see what I did there?) us.

In many ways, there’s not a lot to say about the rest of the journey, compared to that brief vivid moment of “what if…?”

France

Everyone mostly sticking to 130km/h. A few hovering under that… why? A few test-pilots notably over it. And us, fairly well aware of potential penalties for taking the wossname.

Two really good service areas provided morning coffee (decent, even from a machine) and lunch. Decent loos, even if toilet seats must be trading for a good price somewhere, because none were to be seen along the motorway. One really crap service area served our afternoon coffee: bins full, flies everywhere, toilets dreadful. Ah, this is the French motorway experience I remember.

Side note: we got ourselves a proper Liber-t tag, from Emovis Tag UK, to allow us to drive straight through the automatic toll lanes. Worked like a charm: find the lanes marked with a big italic t, leave a bit of a gap behind the car in front, and glide through at 30km/h.

And then….

Germany

Obviously, this meant full beans as soon as possible, modulo the input from the speed limiter. Very impressed with the car at bigger speeds (really, only just over 110mph): not as loud as I expected, and very very stable. Porsche GT dept. pixie dust very much in evidence.

Thankfully we had very little urban driving to deal with upon reaching Zuffenhausen, a relief as I was pretty cream-crackered by that point, with the sun getting low and the time heading towards 7pm.

The hotel was dead easy to find, has a private covered car park, and we were checked in forthwith.

And they deserve a footnote…

Rioca Stuttgart Posto 4

I’ll link to this later when I find the URL, but I can’t recommend this place highly enough if you’re in Zuffenhausen/Stuttgart to visit the Porsche Museum.

They’re a 10 minute walk away from the museum, first off, which makes that simple, and they’re, what, a whole two minute walk from a U-bahn stop which gets you directly to Stuttgart.

It’s an aparthotel: so rooms have a kitchenette, but they’re great value, and the whole place is pretty much brand new. It’s Brazillian-themed, so the decor is on point, and the boxes you care about anywhere are ticked: bathrooms are great, the aircon works (it’s been 30ºC here), and the staff are super helpful and really nice people. They do breakfast, have bar snacks, and enough beer & cocktails to get you into trouble. 10/10.