On saturday 28th October 2000, much against the advice of Michel Fish, I decided to ride my scooter to Brussels. its been standing outside my friend Ians house in Teddington (near Kingston, west London) since the summer so I thought that it may as well be getting rusty in Brussels than London. On Wednesday last week I was all set to get the Eurostar over on Friday night when work decided that I should attend a two day induction course in London! so I got a Eurostar ticket to London for free. I booked the 4pm Saturday Seacat catamaran from Dover to Ostende (there are only three sailings a day and the other two are either too early or too late), that way I could take the local roads down to Brussels as Ostende is much closer to Brussels than Calais (plus its in Belgium). I set off at 9:30 on Saturday morning from Teddington, fully mapped up, wearing three coats and two pairs of gloves taking the south circular through Wandsworth and Clapham and finally out onto the A2 to Dover. Because of all the local Saturday traffic getting out of London took about 2 hours and the trek down the A2 through Kent took another 2. The cross winds were unbelieveable! Averaging about 50mph means that eventually most lorries have to overtake which was no picnic in the wind and rain. The A2 to Dover can't decide whether its an A road or a motorway, still having a provisional licence I kept having to avoid the motorway sections and go through tiny villages.

I got to Dover at around 1:30pm to find that all of the Seacat sailings had been cancelled because of the bad weather and that I'd be given a free ferry ticket to Calais instead! holy toledo, I don't know the way on local roads from Calais and I don't have a map of France! so I got on the ferry not having much choice, I decided to rip off the L plates and go on the motorway. I got talking to an old italian guy on the boat who was riding a Ducati 900 down to Paris, he thought I was mad but we had a chat about bikes and things and went on our way.

With all the faffing about with boats I didn't leave Calais until about 5pm. The E44 is the main truck road for Northern Europe it goes across the top of France and then splits, one way goes up into Holland the other down through Belgium into Germany, so as you can imagine its mega busy. Luckily for me it was not too bad, the wind was still very strong but the amount of traffic was less than I expected and at least it had stopped raining, a couple of frogs got a bit shirty beeping at me and waving their arms about but thats normal for french people. I would have flashed them the Vs but it was too windy to let go of the handle bars! Not being a car driver, changing to driving on the other side of the road was not too bad although I missed an exit slip road for the services at one point so I carried on for a bit and went up the 'on' slip road the wrong way! nobody saw me. Its about 180kms down to brussels and this took another 3 hours with one petrol stop. By the time I got home I was frozen solid like Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber going to Aspen on the monkey bike. I could have stopped for a coffee but once you get going its hard to stop!

That was quite an adventure!